Karst SWAT hydrological modeling at large and regional scale: the case study of the island of Crete

Karst landscape covers approximately 20% of the earth’s surface and provides about 50% of the world’s drinking water. In Europe soluble carbonate rocks covers 35% of whole continent and are widespread in particular in Southern, therefore the karst processes are very significant components of the physical geography of the Mediterranean basins. The aim of this study was to apply SWAT model integrated with a karst-flow model in Crete Island (6,669 km2) characterized by karst-dominant geomorphology.The Crete SWAT model was developed using DEM of 25 m pixel size subdividing the Island in 352 sub-basins with an average area of 20 km2. The combined model (KSWAT) simulated the contribution of the extended karst areas to the discharge of 47 springs. KSWAT was calibrated and validated using a network of 22 monitoring stations and 47 springs respectively for the period 1980-2009 and 1973-2009. The combined model was able to estimate water balance of the whole Crete in different hydrological conditions supporting management decisions regarding public water supply. The KSWAT model was tested also in a large scale version on Crete SWAT model based on DEM 100 m pixel size subdividing the Island in 23 sub-basins with an average area of 127 km2 in order to assess the applicability of karst-model in the current setup of SWAT in macro regions at pan European scale. The results of this study will be presented and discussed together to provide a SWAT modelling protocol to adopt in karst regions.

MALAGO Anna;  EFSTATHIOU Dionissis;  BOURAOUI Faycal;  NIKOLAIDIS Nikolaos;  FRANCHINI Marco;  BIDOGLIO Giovanni;  KRITSOTAKIS Marinos; 

2016-01-01

SWAT

JRC98844

http://swat.tamu.edu/conferences/2015/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC98844,