Assessing Water Budget Sensitivity to Precipitation Forcing Errors in Potomac River Basin Using the VIC Hydrologic Model CyberTraining: Big Data + High-Performance Computing + Atmospheric Sciences

Abstract

The Potomac River Basin is a watershed located on the East Coast of the USA across West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Inter-annual variations in precipitation makes it challenging to plan for water allocation within the basin. Therefore, understanding seasonal to inter-annual variations in water availability within the basin is important for planning water resources management. We set up on a distributed-memory cluster and used the hydrologic model Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) to estimate the water budget components for the Potomac river basin from April to September 2017. We also assessed the effect of precipitation forcing errors and its variability on the water balance for the same time period. We were able to identify April and May as the months where the water balance was most sensitive to variability. Sub-basins with the highest sensitivity over the course of the six months of interest were also identified, and variability in water balance increased as we increased the variability in precipitation.