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Quick, reproducible and automatic watershed modeling with the SHUD: Essential data, simulation, applications and visualization
  • Lele Shu,
  • Paul Ullrich,
  • Christopher Duffy
Lele Shu
University of California Davis

Corresponding Author:lele.shu@gmail.com

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Paul Ullrich
University of California Davis
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Christopher Duffy
Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

The Solver of Hydrological Unstructured Domain (SHUD) is an integrated multi-process, multi-scale, multi-timestep hydrologic model where the dominant hydrological processes are fully coupled using the semi-discrete Finite Volume Method. The hydrologic processes in land surface, aquifer and river are fully coupled and solved together. The high spatial and temporal resolution in SHUD provides detailed and reliable hydrologic metrics in a watershed. The SHUD System consists of SHUD (the hydrologic model) and SHUDtoolbox (a data processing tool kit). The new SHUD system provides capabilities for public data downloads, pre-processing, hydrologic modeling, automatic calibration, post-processing and spatial visualization, and is fully open-source and ready for hydrological modelers to use. Here we introduce the philosophy of SHUD, from perceptual to computational structures of watershed hydrology, and select two watersheds (one in Africa and the other in California) as examples to demonstrate the workflow and capabilities of SHUD System. In modeling these examples, we exploit national/global public datasets and exemplify the data management, hydrologic analysis, model calibration and visualization capabilities. This modeling system not only supports quick deployment of hydrologic modeling functionality, but also benefits community modeling in other hydrology-related research fields, such as limnology, agriculture, climate change and Coupled-Natural-Human systems.