Abstract
Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model have been widely used in simulating hydrology and water quality analysis at watershed scale. The SWAT model extracts topographic feature using the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for hydrology and pollutant generation and transportation within watershed. Use of various DEM cell size in the SWAT leads to different results in extracting topographic feature for each subwatershed. So, it is recommended that model users use very detailed spatial resolution DEM for accurate hydrology analysis and water quality simulation. However, use of high resolution DEM is sometimes difficult to obtain and not efficient because of computer processing capacity and model execution time. Thus, the SWAT Topographic Feature Extraction Error (STOPFEE) Fix module, which can extract topographic feature of high resolution DEM from low resolution and updates SWAT topographic feature automatically, was developed and evaluated in this study. The analysis of average slope vs. DEM cell size revealed that average slope of watershed increases with decrease in DEM cell size, finer resolution of DEM. This falsification of topographic feature with low resolution DEM affects soil erosion and sediment behaviors in the watershed. The annual average sediment for Soyanggang-dam watershed with DEM cell size of 20 m was compared with DEM cell size of 100 m. There was 83.8% difference in simulated sediment without STOPFEE module and 4.4% difference with STOPFEE module applied although the same model input data were used in SWAT run. For Imha-dam watershed, there was 43.4% differences without STOPFEE module and 0.3% difference with STOPFEE module. Thus, the STOPFEE topographic database for Soyanggang-dam watershed was applied for Chungju-dam watershed because its topographic features are similar to Soyanggang-dam watershed. Without the STOPFEE module, there was 98.7% difference in simulated sediment for Chungju-dam watershed for DEM cell size of both 20 m and 100 m. However there was 20.7% difference in simulated sediment with STOPFEE topographic database for Soyanggang-dam watershed. The application results of STOPFEE for three watersheds showed that the STOPFEE module developed in this study is an effective tool to extract topographic feature of high resolution DEM from low resolution DEM. With the STOPFEE module, low-capacity computer can be also used for accurate hydrology and sediment modeling for bigger size watershed with the SWAT. It is deemed that the STOPFEE module database needs to be extended for various watersheds in Korea for wide application and accurate SWAT runs with lower resolution DEM.
