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Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management
António Mendes Lopes (editor), Jiazhong Zhang(editor)
António Mendes Lopes (editor)

University of Porto, Portugal

Email: aml@fe.up.pt

Jiazhong Zhang (editor)

School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi Province 710049, China

Fax: +86 29 82668723 Email: jzzhang@mail.xjtu.edu.cn


Validation of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) in Ungauged Catchment

Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 5(3) (2017) 233--242 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2017.09.005

Lei Chen; Shuang Li; Guobo Wang; Jiajia Xu; Zhenyao Shen

State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, P.R. China

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Abstract

Measured flow and water quality data play important roles in the application of watershed models, and scarcity data become a key barrier for modeling studies, especially for non-point source pollution simulations. This study focused on the impacts of missing measured data on flow and non-point source pollution simulations by using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool. Both the missing rate and missing location of measured flow and total phosphorus were analyzed and discussed. And the extrapolation of parameters to ungauged catchment was discussed in a typical watershed in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China. The results showed that an increasing missing rate would cause worse model performance especially in wet periods. Moreover, the calibrated watershed model could be used in ungauged catchment within an extrapolation idea, but the extrapolation of nonpoint source predictions showed poor perfor-mance. This study also indicated that watershed model could be used for ungauged catchment simulation if similar environments and other hu-man disturbance do not exist. This paper provides new guides for water quality monitoring and the usage of watershed models during ungauged periods.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51579011, & 51409003) and the Fund for Innovative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.51421065).

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