Posts in Hydrology
mHM - mesoscale Hydrologic Model
- 12 December 2024
The mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM) developed by the Dept. Computational Hydrosystems at UFZ is a spatially explicit distributed hydrologic model. It is implemented in the Fortran programming language and can be easily installed as software using the conda package manager. The model concept uses grid cells as a primary hydrologic unit, and accounts for the following processes: canopy interception, snow accumulation and melting, soil moisture dynamics, infiltration and surface runoff, evapotranspiration, subsurface storage and discharge generation, deep percolation and baseflow and discharge attenuation and flood routing. The model is driven by hourly or daily meteorological forcings (e.g., precipitation, temperature), and it utilizes observable basin physical characteristics (e.g., soil textural, vegetation, and geological properties) to infer the spatial variability of the required parameters.
ParFlow - Parallel Watershed Flow Model
- 12 December 2024
ParFlow is a parallel, integrated hydrology model that simulates spatially distributed surface and subsurface flow, as well as land surface processes including evapotranspiration and snow. It solves saturated and variably saturated flow in three dimensions using either an orthogonal or terrain-following, semi-structured mesh that enables fine vertical resolution near the land surface and deep (~1 km) confined and unconfined aquifers. ParFlow models dynamic surface and subsurface flow solving the simplified shallow water equations implicitly coupled to Richards’ equation; this allows for dynamic two-way groundwater surface water interactions and intermittency in streamflow. The model uses robust linear and nonlinear solution techniques and exhibits efficient parallel scaling to large processor counts, more than 100K cores, enabling very large extent simulations with fine spatial resolution. ParFlow has been coupled to various land surface and atmospheric models such as CLM, WRF, and TerrSysMP.