The wet weather pattern since the early 1990's has created two problems for the people living in the Red River Valley (RRV): (1) wet field conditions for farmers and (2) more frequent major spring floods in the Red River system. Farmers in the region are increasingly adopting subsurface drainage practice to remove excess water from their fields to mitigate the first problem. However, it is not clear whether subsurface drainage will deteriorate or mitigate the spring flood situation, the second problem. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model was applied to evaluate the impacts of tile drainage on the Red River's streamflows. The model was calibrated and validated against monthly streamflows at the watershed scale and against daily tile flows at the field scale. The locations and areas of the existing and potential tile drained (PTD) areas were identified using a GIS based decision tree classification method. The existing and maximum PTD areas were found to be about 0.75 and 17.40% of the basin area, respectively. At the field scale, the range of Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) for model calibration and validation was 0.34-0.63. At the watershed scale, the model showed satisfactory performance in simulating monthly streamflows with NSE ranging from 0.69 to 0.99, except that the model under-predicted the highest spring flood peak flows in three years. The results of modeling a 100% tiled experimental field showed that about 30-40% of water yield was produced as tile flow. Surface runoff and soil water content decreased about 34% and 19%, respectively, due to tile drainage. However, the impact of subsurface drainage on evapotranspiration (ET) and water yield was mixed. ET slightly decreased in a wet year and slightly increased in a dry year, while the pattern for water yield was opposite to that of ET. The watershed-scaled modeling results showed that a tiling rate of 0.75-5.70% would not have significant effects on the monthly average streamflows in the Red River at Fargo. For the 17.40% tiling rate, the streamflow in the Red River at Fargo might increase up to 1% in April and about 2% in Fall (September to November), while decreasing up to 5% in the remaining months. This SWAT modeling study helped to better understand the impact of subsurface drainage on the water balance and streamflows in the Red River of the North basin. The findings will also help watershed managers in making decisions for the purpose of managing agricultural drainage development in the RRV and other snow dominated watersheds around the world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ndsu.edu/oai:library.ndsu.edu:10365/29555 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Rahman, Mohammed Mizanur |
| Publisher | North Dakota State University |
| Source Sets | North Dakota State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text/thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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