Excessive load of nitrogen from anthropogenic sources is a threat to sustaining a healthy aquatic ecosystem. The difficulty in identifying the critical source areas (CSAs) of nitrogen load and apportioning the in-stream nitrogen to individual sources spatially and seasonally has made the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) useful for analyzing nitrogen load at the catchment scale. However, the uncertainty of the nitrogen load simulated by SWAT has rarely been analyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Whole-cell (WC) modeling is a promising tool for biological research, bioengineering, and medicine. However, substantial work remains to create accurate comprehensive models of complex cells.
Methods: We organized the 2015 Whole-Cell Modeling Summer School to teach WC modeling and evaluate the need for new WC modeling standards and software by recoding a recently published WC model in the Systems Biology Markup Language.
We used observed climate data, an ensemble of four GCM-RCM combinations (global and regional climate models) and the water balance model mGROWA to estimate present and future groundwater recharge for the intensively-used Thau lagoon catchment in southern France. In addition to a highly resolved soil map, soil moisture distributions obtained from SAR-images (Synthetic Aperture Radar) were used to derive the spatial distribution of soil parameters covering the full simulation domain. Doing so helped us to assess the impact of different soil parameter sources on the modelled groundwater recharge levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines the impact of changing climatic conditions on groundwater recharge in the Riu Mannu catchment in southern Sardinia. Based on an ensemble of four downscaled and bias corrected combinations of Global and Regional Climate Models (GCM-RCMs), the deterministic distributed water balance model mGROWA was used to simulate long-term mean annual groundwater recharge in the catchment for four 30-year periods between 1981 and 2100. The four employed GCM-RCM combinations project an adverse climatic development for the study area: by the period 2071-2100, annual rainfall will decrease considerably, while grass reference evapotranspiration will rise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Environ Sci (China)
September 2014
Within a collaborative project between Slovenian Environment Agency (ARSO) and Research Center Jülich (FZJ), nitrogen reduction levels necessary to reach groundwater quality targets in Slovenia were assessed. For this purpose the hydrological model GROWA-DENUZ was coupled with agricultural N balances and applied consistently to the whole territory of Slovenia in a spatial resolution of 100×100m. GROWA was used to determine the water balance in Slovenia for the hydrologic period 1971-2000.
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