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Abstract
Historically, water problems (i.e. water shortage and water quality) are major concerns to the people of the arid and semi-arid Southwest of US. The region consecutively experienced droughts in the history, which had large impacts on water resources. Therefore, water resources management has become an important issue to the society of this region. Exploitation of both types of water sources (i.e. ground and surface) has made it particularly significant to evaluate, monitor, analyze, and predict water quality and quantity of the region for sustainable water resources management. The whole investigation is divided into three parts; each part presents an individual study on water problems of the Southwest. The first study aims to find an effective estimation technique for groundwater quality constituents in the semi-arid Southern New Mexico border region. I investigated how well the kriging methods perform to generate a geostatistical surface of the contaminant concentrations being examined. Although Empirical Bayesian Kriging (EBK) seems like a strong interpolator over other methods, the performance of different kriging techniques vary on a case-by-case basis. In the second study, I evaluated the performance of SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) model in simulating flow in the multiple sub watersheds at the Upper Rio Grande. This part presents the deployment of hydrologic models with statistically projected climate data and observed climate data to predict surface flows. I evaluated overall performances based on the agreement with the observed flow; I calibrated and cross-validated the predicted flow with observed flow for the selected watersheds and years. I found that the simulated flow was statistically insignificant in terms of agreement with observed data for all three watersheds. In the last part, I investigated the altered relationship between expected runoff and all other factor variables in the Upper Rio Graden Basin. By studying a number of prospective variables such as precipitation, temperature, albedo, soil moisture, SWE, snow cover, snow depth and sublimation, I identified important variables that affect runoff volume in different sub-watersheds, and I observed seasonal changes in variable importance. I found that the variables influencing naturalized streamflow change not only by month or season, but also by watershed and mountain range.
