A Universal Solution to Prairie Pothole Hydrology: Enhancing Generality and Implementation Across Hydrological Models

This repository contains the HDS standalone software source code and the source codes of the following modified hydrological models, which were modified to accommodate HDS, HYPE, MESH, and SUMMA. This repository also includes the model inputs and results for the three hydrological models at the Smith Creek Research Basin (SCRB). The software and data are part of the following paper "A Universal Solution to Prairie Pothole Hydrology: Enhancing Generality and Implementation Across Hydrological Models" submitted to Water Resources Research for publication.

The source codes are also available at the following github repositories:

HDS: https://github.com/CH-Earth/HDS

HYPE: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hype/files/

MESH: https://github.com/MESH-Model/MESH-Dev

SUMMA: https://github.com/CH-Earth/summa/tree/develop

The following folders are included:

HDS_standalone_code: contains the HDS standalone source code along with a hypothetical test case.

HYPE: This folder contains the modified HYPE model source code (located under source_code subfolder) and model setup files and results for the comparison of HDSv1 and HDSv2 with uncalibrated model setup (located under runs/HDS_v1_v2_comparison subfolder), HYPE-ilake model (located under runs/HYPE-ilake subfolder), and HYPE-HDS model (located under runs/HYPE-HDS subfolder).

MESH: This folder contains the modified MESH model source code (located under source_code subfolder) and model setup files and results for MESH-PDMROF model (located under runs/MESH-PDMROF subfolder) and MESH-HDS model (located under runs/MESH-HDS subfolder)

SUMMA: This folder contains the modified SUMMA model source code (located under source_code subfolder) and model setup files and results for SUMMA-noPothole model (located under runs/SUMMA-noPothole subfolder) and SUMMA-HDS model (located under runs/SUMMA-HDS subfolder)

Abstract

Modelling the streamflow of low-lying, flat, and pothole-dominated prairie or arctic regions poses challenges due to variable non-contributing areas that influence the translation of local runoff to streamflow. Efforts have been made to represent the non-contributing area dynamics for streamflow prediction in different models. However, these efforts may not adequately represent pothole dynamics, rely heavily on calibration, are not applicable to large-scale basins, and/or are not model-agnostic. In this study, we introduce an open-source and model-agnostic version of a revised Hysteretic Depressional Storage (HDS) model that is based on an improved numerical solution (compared to the initial version of HDS) that better captures the hysteretic relationships of prairie potholes and their impact on streamflow generation. The revised HDS model is implemented and tested in three hydrological or land models of different complexities (HYPE, MESH, and SUMMA) on a prairie pothole basin in Canada. The revised version of HDS is a more accurate and numerically robust version of the original HDS model. Results demonstrate the numerical robustness of the revised HDS model when compared to the original HDS model (that suffers from numerical instabilities) within HYPE. Further, results demonstrate enhanced simulations of streamflow responses in the tested basin when HDS is integrated into the models. Importantly, the modified models successfully replicate the known hysteretic relationships between depressional storage and contributing areas in the region. The open-source HDS implementation approach is designed for integration into hydrologic or land surface modelling systems, enabling improvements in simulating complex hydrology and streamflow patterns globally.