DRAINMOD modelling for a Norwegian catchment

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My MSc thesis at Wageningen University started from a simple question that turned out to be complicated: how does water actually move through an agricultural catchment in Norway?

I used DRAINMOD, a hydrological model originally built for poorly drained soils. It is used worldwide to design drainage systems, but mostly at field scale. I wanted to know whether you could push it to catchment scale, and whether it made sense in Norwegian conditions: mixed farmland and forest, hilly terrain, and soils that freeze and thaw.

The model let me run experiments on soil properties, drain spacing, surface storage, lateral conductivity and the temperature thresholds for freezing and thawing. Drain spacing and lateral hydraulic conductivity turned out to control the water balance. Surface storage mattered for peak flow. For sensitivity analysis the model worked well, because you could see which settings moved the system. It struggled with the hilly terrain and the spatial variation of a real catchment.

So DRAINMOD helped me understand how the system behaves, but it did not capture Norwegian drainage very well. It was built for flat fields, and this was a mixed, hilly catchment.

The full thesis is below.

Hydrological Modelling | Timon Weitkamp | No Worries, Just Maps

DRAINMOD modelling for a Norwegian catchment

Read the thesis