This semi-distributed VSA model is included in the EcoHydRology

package in R ( Fuka et al., 2013b). The conceptual model described here has three unknown parameters, Sd (Eq. selleck chemicals (2)), and Tp and b, which characterize the storm hydrograph. All other parameters in the study were obtained independently from open source and commonly available data, e.g., soil properties (i.e., AWC, T) from the USDA-NRCS SSURGO or STATSGO databases, and watershed characteristics (i.e., a, tan(β), watershed area, etc.) determined from a USGS digital elevation model (DEM). We used 10 USGS-gauged watersheds in New Jersey (NJ), Pennsylvania (PA), and New York (NY) in the northeastern USA ( Fig. 2) to develop methods for regionally estimating the

unknown parameters. Watersheds varied in size from approximately 10 km2 (Biscuit Brook, NY) to over 4000 km2 (Allegheny River, NY, PA) ( Table 1). We used daily measurements of precipitation and maximum and minimum temperatures as inputs for the model (NOAA, 2013). Daily streamflow measurements at these sites were from the USGS (2013). Watershed characteristics determined by topography, average soil depth, average available water capacity, and latitude were from the USDA and the USGS (USDA-NRCS, 2013 and USGS, 2013). These watersheds were used to develop regional relationships between a watershed-wide soil water deficit, SWDd, and Sd. They were also used to determine a relationship between watershed size and topography, and Tp. To develop a regional relationship for Sd, click here we identified 532 isolated events from all the watersheds considered. Because Eq. (2) is most accurate in larger precipitation events ( USDA-NRCS, 2004), we only considered events with daily rain and/or snowmelt events that were at least 20 mm and associated with an isolated rise in the streamflow hydrograph. From these, we estimated the storm runoff not using a one-pass baseflow separation filter ( Lyne and Hollick, 1979) ( Appendix

A). We calculated Sd-values (by rearranging Eq. (2)) from these events using the technique described by Shaw and Walter (2009). We used Eq. (1) to estimate SWd continuously to determine SWDd, which we then correlated with the back-calculated Sd-values. We used the take-one-out methodology to ensure that no single watershed was biasing the Sd–SWDd relationship. To develop regionalized functions to describe the storm hydrograph, which has two parameters, Tp and b, we identified 214 well-defined events from the 10 watersheds. The criteria defining these events were: rain (+snow melt) > 10 mm and no days with more than 2 mm for the two preceding and the five following days. These criteria allowed us to balance identifying many hydrographs while minimizing the impacts of rain and snow melt before and after an event on the hydrograph shape. The b parameter determines the overall shape of the runoff hydrograph, and for this study we found that a constant value of 4.