The Susquehanna River Basin Experiment
The Susquehanna River Basin Experiment (SRBEX) is the first of several planned regional experiments being undertaken by memebers of the Penn State/MSFC EOS interdisciplinary study team. SRBEX attempts to integrate remotely sensed information, surface properties data, and a number of climate, mesoscale atmospheric, and hydrology models to evaluate the models' ability to simulate actual hydroclimatic conditions and their potential for predicting the effects of future changes in atmospheric composition and other factors which may affect climate.

The main components of SRBEX are
  1. Acquiring and preprocessing available geographic data describing surface topography, geology, soils, hydrology, and landuse/landcover to extract parameters required by other SRBEX components.

  2. Analyzing meteorological, hydrologic, and related records to select representative events for model simulation and establish empirical relationships between watershed hydrologic responses and synoptic forcing.

  3. Extracting estimates of soil surface moisture and temperature from remotely sensed imagery in the context of soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer (SVAT) models.

  4. Estimating soil moisture over time using a soil hydrology model (SHM) driven by actual weather observations.

  5. Determining the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall and related parameters over the Susquehanna River Basin using a mesoscale atmospheric model .

  6. Using a global-scale general circulation model to provide boundary conditions for the mesoscale model for both current and modified (e.g., doubled carbon dioxide) atmospheric compositions.

  7. Predicting precipitation infiltration, runoff, and stream flows using a terrestrial hydrology model (THM) driven by the rainfall and related data generated by the mesoscale model.

  8. Estimating variations in stream water chemistry and quality associated with the terrestrial hydrographic conditions predicted by the models.

  9. Investigating the impact of climate change on landscape evolution and human activities.

  10. Providing data retrieval and manipulation tools for database management, visualization and analysis of the results of experiments, and conversions between the diverse scales, map projections, formats, computer platforms, etc., used by different SRBEX components.

Regular meetings of SRBEX participants permit close coordination of the activities outlined above and the definition of a series of linked-model simulations. The diagram below shows the major categories of input data, the principal analysis and modeling steps, and the relations between them.
Last change: 24 May 1995, R. A. White / raw@essc.psu.edu