Water Budget Science in Oklahoma and Texas

A water budget is an accounting of hydrologic components of the water cycle, transfers between the components, and their relative contributions within a water system. Water budgets help define how much water is available, how much water is used, where the water comes from, and at what rate water is replenished or consumed. In its simplest form, a water budget defines the amount of water entering and leaving a water system. The USGS Oklahoma-Texas Water Science Center (OTWSC) provides data and information about water-budget components that are needed to manage water resources in Texas. Visit the links below for more information on our data and science.

Basic components of water budgets are precipitation, evapotranspiration, surface-water and groundwater flow into and out of the watershed or aquifer, change in surface-water and groundwater storage, and human withdrawals and interbasin transfers.

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WATER BUDGET SCIENCE CAPABILITIES

OTWSC has expertise in water budget science applications, including, but not limited to:

Modeling analysis to estimate water-budget components under different climate and water-use scenarios
Quanitifying potential changes in hydrologic budgets due to vegetative land-cover changes at a watershed scale.
Estimating groundwater recharge using statistical regression techniques
Monitoring evapotranspiration rates to evaluate how changes in land cover and soil moisture content may change water budgets
Determining groundwater sources, recharge, discharge, and mixing zones
Collecting streamflow data.

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