The Soil And Water Assessment Tool (SWAT)

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SWAT is the acronym for Soil and Water Assessment Tool, a river basin, or watershed, scale model developed by Dr. Jeff Arnold in 1985 for the USDA Agricultural Research Service. SWAT is a conceptual, physically-based, continuous simulation, watershed model, developed in the early 1990s (Arnold et al., 1993). The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was developed to predict the effects of different management practices on water quality, sediment yield and pollution loading in watersheds (Chen and Adams, 2006). The ArcSWAT model, a version of SWAT integrated with a Geographic Information System (Winchell, 2007) allows the user to prepare SWAT input and run the model within the framework of ArcGIS (Winchell, 2007).
2.5.1. BASIC FEATURES OF SWAT SWAT is a continuous time scale, long-term yield spatially discrete model. The model is not designated for single-event flood routing. Compared to other modelling environment, SWAT has some unique features (Neitsch, 2005) SWAT is the process based model. Rather than incorporating regression equations to describe the relationship between input and output variables, SWAT requires specific information about weather, soil properties, topography, vegetation, and land management practices occurring in the watershed. The physical processes associated …show more content…

By using the soil map (1:50,000), land-use map (1:50,000) and weather data of one station, the related databases were first constructed, and then a simulation was made. The results were evaluated by Nash-Sutcliffe (NSE) and correlation coefficient (R2). The resulted NSE and R2 were 0.98 and 0.99 for calibration; 0.91 and 0.98 for validation period. This indicate that the simulation results were acceptable and demonstrated that the SWAT model could get a good simulation in daily as well as in monthly time step under some

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