Monotonic Trends in Modelled Water Supply for Select Outputs from NHM-PRMS, WRF-Hydro, and CONUS404-BA, 1983-2021 and 2000-2020

This dataset contains the Mann-Kendall p value, Theil - Sen slope estimate, summary statistics for eleven modelled water budget components simulated by the following modeling applications: the National Hydrologic Model Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (NHM-PRMS) version 1.1 (Markstrom and others, 2024), the Weather Research and Forecasting hydrological modeling application (WRF-Hydro; Rafieeinasab and others, 2026), and from the bias-adjusted CONUS404 climate forcing variable subset (CONUS404-BA; Zhang and others, 2024).

he data are provided at two spatial regionalizations: 1) The 12-digit Hydrologic Use Code (HUC-12), a set of over 85,000 areas across the contiguous United States developed from the Water Boundary Dataset (available at Blodgett, 2023) and 2) Van Metre Regions, a set of 18 large regions within the contiguous United States originally reported in Van Metre and others (2020). The source data from this analysis consists of NHM-PRMS and WRF-Hydro, both modeling applications are forced using CONUS404-BA, and were aggregated to a monthly HUC-12 scale (Sampson and others, 2026; Foks and others, 2024, Foks and others, 2025). Each water budget component can have multiple statistics on which the trends are analyzed; soil moisture and snow water equivalent each have the most statistics. Trends were computed on a water year (October 1 - September 30th) basis and for seasons winter (December, January, February), spring (March, April, May), summer (June, July, August), and fall (September, October, November). In addition to the NHM-PRMS and WRF-Hydro individual trend results, the two models were averaged to create an "ensemble" result. Trends were computed for two time periods: 1) Water Year 1983 - 2021, the longest complete overlapping period for the NHM-PRMS and WRF-Hydro models and 2) and Water Year 2000-2020, a period of interest in associated USGS projects.

This dataset is intended to support assessments of changes in water supply within the contiguous United States. Users are encouraged to review the metadata for additional information regarding how the datasets were prepared. A reproducible coding pipeline in the R computer language is provided in this data release to enable users to understand the data preparation and to adapt as necessary for other purposes.

References:
 

Blodgett, D. L. 2022. Mainstem Rivers of the Conterminous United States (ver. 2.0, February 2023): U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P92U7ZUT.
Foks, S. S., LaFontaine, J. H., McDonald, R. R., Snyder, A. M., Staub, L. E., Kolb, K., LaMotte, A. E., and Viger, R. Daily twelve-digit hydrologic unit code aggregations of snow water equivalent, soil moisture, and actual evapotranspiration estimates from the National Hydrologic Model Precipitation Runoff Modeling System forced with CONUS404-BA: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026a, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P13WDBTQ.
Foks, S. S., McDonald, R. R., LaMotte, A. E., LaFontaine, J. H., and Viger, R. Monthly twelve-digit hydrologic unit code aggregations of the CONUS404 bias adjusted application, 1979–2021: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026b, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P1AM8AM7.
Markstrom, S. L., Norton, P. A., Dickinson, J. E., LaFontaine, J. H., McDonald, R. R., and Regan, R. D. Application of the National Hydrologic Model Infrastructure (NHM) with the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) and Geospatial Fabric version 1.1, 1980–2021, CONUS404BA: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P148FA7G.
RafieeiNasab, A., Gochis, D., Srivastava, I., Dugger, A., Sampson, K., Omani, N., Mazrooei, A., Zhang, Y., Casali, M., and LaFontaine, J. H. Application of the WRF-Hydro Modeling System for the Conterminous United States at the NHDPlus version 2 Spatial Resolution Using the Bias Adjusted Version of the CONUS404 Atmospheric Forcings (CONUS404BA), Water Years 2010–2021: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P1KZGLU2.
Sampson, K., Dugger, A., RafieeiNasab, A., Zhang, Y., LaFontaine, J. H., LaMotte, A. E., Kolb, K., Foks, S. S., and Viger, R. Monthly and daily twelve-digit hydrologic unit code aggregations of the WRF-Hydro modeling application with CONUS404BA Atmospheric Forcings, 1979–2022: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P1K7NC8A.
Van Metre, P. C., Qi, S., Deacon, J., Dieter, C., Driscoll, J. M., Fienen, M., Kenney, T., Lambert, P., Lesmes, D., Mason, C. A., Mueller-Solger, A., Musgrove, M., Painter, J., Rosenberry, D., and others. 2020. Prioritizing river basins for intensive monitoring and assessment by the US Geological Survey: Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, v. 192, no. 7, p. 458, at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-020-08403-1.
Zhang, Y., Grim, J. A., Cabell, R. S., Srivastava, I., Gochis, D. J., Prein, A. F., Rasmussen, R. M., Ikeda, K., and Schneider, T. L. CONUS404 climate forcing variable subset for hydrologic models, 1979–2022: downscaled to 1 km and bias-adjusted for precipitation and temperature: U.S. Geological Survey, accessed March 12, 2026, at https://doi.org/10.5066/P9JE61P7.