CONSTRUCTING A PROBLEM SOLVING ENVIRONMENT TOOL FOR HYDROLOGIC ASSESSMENT OF LAND USE CHANGE

Using the Back Creek watershed in the upper Roanoke River basin, VA, as the study area, a graphically based, user-friendly, web-enabled Problem Solving Environment was developed based on the Hydrologic Simulation Program Fortran, which was developed as a union between the Stanford Watershed Model and several water-quality models used to simulate the water quantity and quality processes occurring in a developing watershed. The aim of the framework was to allow a user to execute the simulation program to evaluate the hydrologic effects of alternative urbanization scenarios without requiring detailed knowledge of the model structure. Land-use changes were specified entirely in terms of changes in proportional land use within a subbasin. All aspects of constructing the Problem Solving Environment are detailed. The results for the Back Creek watershed show that urbanization affected the hydrology of an area at different scales in a highly complex manner.