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Large-area hydrologic modelling can play an important role in policy planning related to water and land management issues. Models are often required to assess the impacts and risks of management alternatives on the availability and quality of water in large and complex river systems. This paper describes the Hydrologic Unit Model for the United States (HUMUS): a decision support system designed for making national and river basin scale resource assessments. The components of the HUMUS system include: (1) the basin-scale Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model; (2) a GIS to manage spatial inputs and outputs; and (3) relational databases of climate, soil, crop and management properties. The HUMUS system was applied and validated against flow sediment at three scales: (1) the entire conterminous US; (2) the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river basin; and (3) The Richland and Chambers creeks watersheds. HUMUS is currently the basis of numerous impact analyses designed to improve water resources management at the local, regional, national, and international scales.
Srinivasan et al. (Tue,) studied this question.