Luis Vives

Empleo del modelo hidrológico SWAT en regiones de llanuras

Plain landscapes are usually exposed to extreme hydrological events that generate social, political and economic conflicts. Large areas are affected by these extremes. In the case of water excesses, flat relief makes difficult to drain surface water away giving rise to waterlogging and groundwater table rising. Conversely, droughts affect production due to the lack of surface and ground water. To quantify extreme hydrologic processes in the “Depressed Pampa”, the SWAT model was evaluated at the Santa Catalina creek Watershed (138 km2). This mathematical, continuous and semi-distributed model allowed modeling groundwater flow and surface runoff, in order to analyze the impact of land use changes. SWAT was used to simulate a 10-year period (2003-2012), with extremes of flood and drought, considering a warming-up period of 3 years (2003-2005). A statistic evaluation showed that SWAT was able to predict daily flows, with a Nash Suftclife Efficiency (NSE) of 0.66 for the calibration period (2006-2007) and 0.74 at validation (2011-2012). Model outputs were used to build maps in order to analyze surface runoff patterns, as well as groundwater recharge areas in the acuifer. In this work, some recommendations are discussed to be taken into account when hydrologic processes are simulated in flat watersheds.