SWAT-Related Job Announcements

Research Project: The Soil & Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) has been used extensively within the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Program (CEAP) for evaluating the effectiveness of conservation practices to improve water quality in U.S. watersheds. The National Agroecosystem Model (NAM) is an implementation of SWAT+ for the continental U.S., which considers field-scale hydrologic, nutrient, and plant production processes as well as routing of water and nutrient flows through the national watershed system. A goal of the present opportunity is to evaluate and apply the SWAT+ NAM model to address questions on sustainability of water resources and food production systems across the western United States.

Under the guidance of a mentor, the research objectives for this opportunity include:

• Evaluate and improve model simulations of groundwater recharge and evapotranspiration to facilitate future irrigation and water resource assessments,
• Evaluate options for NAM weather input data and assess its ability for accurate representation of reference evapotranspiration,
• Obtain estimates of actual evapotranspiration and standardized reference evapotranspiration from the OpenET remote sensing platform for evaluation of NAM evapotranspiration simulations at various scales,
• Utilize the SWAT+ water allocation module for evaluating NAM-simulated water transfers and reservoir storage, and
• Evaluate outcomes of water management scenarios for achieving groundwater sustainability in the western United States.