Water budget estimation for a water availability assessment across the conterminous United States for water years 2010–2020

This pipeline calculates a simple monthly water budget that includes water supply and consumptive use for thermoelectric, irrigation, and public supply for 12-digit Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC12) across the conterminous United States for water years 2010-2020. Water budget results also include an assessment of supply and use imbalances within the context of historical climatic conditions to calculate a surface water supply and use index and when considering a range of environmental flow allocation methods. This pipeline ingests water supply, consumptive use, and routing information and accumulates and routes the water balance through the HUC12 network. This pipeline was developed in support of the USGS National Water Availability 2010-2020 report (Stets and others, in prep.).
Monthly HUC12-level water supply estimates are derived from two national-scale hydrologic models: the USGS National Hydrologic Model (NHM), which is a national-scale application of the Precipitation Runoff Modeling System (Regan and others, 2018), and the Weather Research and Forecasting Hydrologic Model (WRF-Hydro; Rafieeinasab and others, in prep.). Both hydrologic models were forced with the CONUS404 hydroclimate dataset (Rasmussen and others, 2023). Monthly HUC12-level consumptive water use was estimated from three national-scale irrigation, thermoelectric power generation, and public supply water use models (Alzraiee and others, in prep.; Harris and others, in prep.; Martin and others, in prep.). The pipeline has three main steps: 1) fetch water supply and consumptive use data, 2) process those data into a common format for routing and accumulation through the HUC12 network, and 3) calculate and route the water budget through the HUC12 network. In the third step, the water budget is calculated using both the NHM and WRF-Hydro separately, and those monthly results are averaged for each HUC12. Additionally, the monthly surface water supply and use index and multiple metrics of environmental flow allocation are calculated for all HUC12s.