IntroductionThe agricultural practice of field tillage has dramatic effects on surface hydrologic properties, significantly altering the processes of infiltration, evaporation, and runoff. In dryland farming regions such as the Palouse of the Pacific Northwest it is essential to maintain an adequate and reliable water supply as water is the limiting factor to crop yield in most years (Pannkuk, 1998).

Conservation techniques leave a greater amount of crop residue on the surface after harvest that provides a physical barrier against runoff and evaporation (Fuentes, 2003) in addition to increasing infiltration by regulating soil temperature during cold weather (Singh, 2009). The purpose of this study is to investigate no-till methods and to simulate the over-winter water savings that may occur under widespread adoption of these methods using hydrologic modeling.

ResultsCalibration at the basin scale for the North Fork Palouse River without considering tillage effects over a 10-year period resulted in a Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient of 0.76 and a volume error of 2.3%.

Field scale calibration results will be used in watershed scale simulations to quantify the widespread impacts of no-till adoption. Soil moisture in the root zone at the beginning of the growing season will be compared for conventional and no-till. Increased retention of water through the winter months and a higher soil water content at the beginning of the growing season may have the potential to increase crop yields in this arid region.

Conclusions• DHSVM has the potential to distinguish some of the key differences

between the impacts of no-till farming and conventional methods through the adjusting of soil and vegetation model parameters.

• A considerable amount of water may be retained in the seed-zone during the winter months by decreasing evaporation and runoff through the correct use no-till farming and residue management.

Contact

Joshua Van Wie

Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering

PO Box 642910, Pullman, WA 99164-2910

joshvanwie@hotmail.com 

Frozen soil• A simple algorithm given by

Wigmosta (2009) is added to DHSVM to predict soil freezing using air and surface temperatures and a weighting factor w:

Tts = Tt

s-1 + w (Tt

a = Tts-1)

• The hydraulic conductivity of frozen soil is reduced so that water does not infiltrate into frozen ground.

•Incoming radiation is affected by albedo and transmissivity through the residue layer. A method presented by Novak (2000) is added to DHSVM to adjust transmissivity:

τ (R) = (1 – ΔR) (1 – ΩΔR)

•Incoming and outgoing longwave radiation are adjusted by applying a “view factor” to the Stefan-Boltzmann equation representing the fractional vegetation cover:

L = fN+1 εs σT4

Radiation Balance

Hydrologic modeling of conservation farming practices on the Palouse

Joshua Van Wie a, Jennifer Adam a, Jeff Ullman b a Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, b Department of Biological Systems Engineering, Washington State University

Management Scenarios

• Region-wide management scenarios are modeled to study the impacts of widespread adoption of conservation methods. Soil moisture is compared for no-till and conventional tillage.

Stream network Vegetation Elevation

MethodsTillage effects are represented in DHSVM by adjusting soil and vegetation parameters according to the intensity of tillage. The model is calibrated and verified using field scale runoff data from land under conventional and no-till management.

Model• The Distributed Hydrology Soil Vegetation Model (DHSVM)

(Wigmosta et al. 1994) is applied for this research.

• The model is first calibrated and validated at the field scale and then at the watershed scale.

• Model inputs include soil, vegetation, and elevation data along with a stream network and climate forcing data.

L = longwave radiationfN+1 = view factorε = emissivity of atmosphere or ground surfaceσ = Stefan-Boltzmann constantT = temperature of atmosphere or ground surface

τ (Ri) = transmittance ΔR = residue area indexΩ = clumping index

Soil moisture contents in the North and South forks of the Palouse River basin for early April under two scenarios: A. Heavy conventional tillage represented by bare soil with no

understory and low albedo during the winter months.B. No-till modeled with an understory and high albedo during the

winter.

A B