The Russian River Watershed (RRW) covers about 1300 square miles (without Santa Rosa Plain) of urban, agricultural, and forested lands in northern Sonoma County and southern Mendocino County, California. Communities in the RRW depend on a combination of Russian River water and groundwater to meet their water-supply demands. Water is used primarily for agricultural irrigation, municipal and private wells supply, and commercial uses - such as for wineries and recreation. Annual rainfall in the RRW is highly variable, making it prone to droughts and flooding from atmospheric river events. In order to better understand surface-water and groundwater issues, the USGS is creating a Coupled Ground-Water and Surface-Water Flow Model (GSFLOW; Markstrom and others, 2008) of the RRW. This model will include climate, geology, surface-water, groundwater, and land-use data.
This data release is legacy spatial data that covers the Russian River watershed. This data was used as input to develop initial parameter values for the Russian River Integrated Hydrologic Model (RRIHM) Streamflow-Routing Package (SFR), a GSFLOW model. See the publication "Input data processing tools for the integrated hydrologic model GSFLOW" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364815217311908#sec9) for information on how this data set was used was used to develop initial parameters.
This data release contains 2 shapefiles used in the Russian River Integrated Hydrologic Model (RRIHM). These shapefiles are: 1) stream network with SFR parameter values - but without calibrated parameters, and 2) specifed flows. It also includes 1 comma separated values (CSV) file of Rubber Dam observations. It also includes 1 Excel dataset of stream network flow accumulation.
