Hydrologic Modeling for Watersheds in Southern Quebec using ArcSWAT

By Zhiming Qi, McGill University for BREE 509

Goal: To set up and run ArcSWAT for a wathershed in southern Quebec. Files required to run ArcSWAT
are: 1) digital elevation map (DEM), 2) land use, 3) soil, 4) weather. In this tutorial, those files are
processed for southern Quebec and is ready for use. If more DEM images are needed for other
watersheds in southern Quebec or anywhere else, please let me know. Measured data is outflow of a
river/stream which can be downloaded by installing HYDAT from Canadian National Water Data Archive.
The example used in this tutorial is the northern branch of Nicolet River near Nicolet, QC (close to Trois-
Rivieres).

Task: submit a lab report describe the difficulties you have experiences and things you have learnt from
this lab. Discussion on the model performance and possibilities to improve the results. Include images of
1) basin map with sub-watershed; 2) land use in this watershed; 3) soil type in this watershed”, 4) slope
of this watershed; include two figures with observed and simulated outflow for calibration and
validation period; include a table with percent bias (PBIAS) and Nash-Sutcliffe Model Efficiency (NSE) for
the calibration and validation periods, respectively.

Download the zip file from myCourses for this lab; unzip it and save it somewhere for use (in my case I
save it under C:\Zhiming_Qi\ArcSWAT2018\).

A. Set-up ArcSWAT project

1) Launch ArcGIS: Start->All Programs-> under ArcGIS folder -> click ArcMap10.x.

Click “ Cancel” when ArcMap –Getting Started is popped up.

2) click “SWAT Project Setup” -> “New SWAT Project”; Save current document? “No”.
3) Project setup: choose path where you want to save the project. I created a folder “bree509_qi” under
the path C:\Zhiming_Qi\ArcSWAT2018\, so all the ArcSWAT project files will be saved in this folder. Click
OK. “Project setup is done” will be shown. Click “OK”.

B. Watershed delineation

1) Load in the DEM (Digital Elevation Map, Note: pre-process by re-projection to UTM northern sphere
zone 18 N where Montreal lies) by clicking “adding data”: . DEM is placed in “DEM_SQC” folder (SQC
means southern Quebec). Find the path “DEM_SQC” in your computer and load the “dem_c1.tif” into
ArcSWAT by clicking “Add”.
Optional: you can load inQuebec administrative map (AdminQC_utm\SouthernQC.shp and
Admin3QC_utm.shp) and southern Quebec river network (River_SQC\southQC_rivers.shp) to get a
geographical reference.

2) Select “Watershed Delineator” -> “Automatic Watershed Delination”.

3) click “Open DEM Raster”, choose “Select from Map”, select “dem_c1.tif”, OK.
 4) click “Calculating flow direction and accumulation (need to find out where the rivers are). It will take
a few seconds. “End of DEM grid preprocessing” will pop up. Click OK. Then click the icon in “Stream

network\Create streams and outlets”.

The stream network is shown below. They are well connected and aligned with the Quebec river
network. Every dot is the concurrent (junction) or outlet of the river network.
5) No action will be done for “Outlet and Inlet Definition”. We will used one dot on the map as the
outlet for the northern branch of Nicolet River. If you want to define your own outlet, a dot can be
added by clicking “Edit manually”. There is no any inlet either (i.e. municipal sewage).

6) Select watershed outlet: first zoom in the dot (outlet); then click “Whole watershed outlet(s)”

If a message like this pops up, it means that you should zoom in more:
Then click “Delineate watershed”. It will take a few seconds. Zoom out the ArcMap the watershed is
shown below.

7) A very important step: “Calculate subbasin parameters”: . Without this step, no calculation can
be done. After it is completed in a few seconds, click OK on the window below. This concludes the
watershed delineation.

C. Land Use, Soil, and Slope Definition.

1) Under HRU (hydrologic unit) analysis, click “Land Use/Soils/Slope Definition”.

Land Use:

2) For land use, click the open folder icon under “Land Use Grid”, choose “Load Land Use dataset(s) from
disk, click “Open” (figure above). You will be asked “Is the grid of the shapefile projected”, click Yes. Go
up one level , then find the land use file “s_qc_lc_prj1.tif” in \ArcSWAT2018\Landuse_SQC. (Note:
the land use data was processed by me: it was and has to be re-projected to UTM). There may be an
error message but click OK and a message below (suggesting successfully loaded) will be shown. OK.
Land use map will be shown below (your computer might use different color band).

3) Further setup land use, choose “VALUE” under “Choose Grid Field”, OK. (this means that in the
attribute table, there are two columns in the Land Use file (“s_qc_lc_prj1.tif” in this particular case): one
is value (category. Which value represent what kind of land use, ie. forest or agriculture, is usually given
at the website where you download this image. Using this information, I made the Lookup table which is
used below), and the other is count (how many pixels for each category). Values, rather than count, is
used to define each pixel. Click OK, then the Value and percentage of each land use is shown.
4) Define those land use value using the language of SWAT, i.e. convert the value to SWAT land use
code. Click the LookUP Table -> “User Table”, and I made this table for you and you can use for other
project if you are using the same land cover data: Lookup_landuse.txt. For more information about how
to download land cover data for places rather than southern Qubec, see the instructions on how to
prepare for the ArcSWAT dataset or Youtube video “ArcSwat Tutorial 3 – HRU 1 Land Use” by
SpierWIUClasses. Click Select.

5) After clicking “Select”, the land use classification table will be shorter because some values represent
the same land use code of ArcSWAT. They are classified in different ways. Click “Reclassify”, and a
competed message will be shown below:
Soil:

6) Choose “Soil Data” tab, and click “Load Soils dataset(s) from disk” -> “Open”, click “Yes” when being
asked about whether it is projected. Select “sqc_soil_int11.tif” from \ArcSWAT2018\Soil_SQC (agin, sqc
represents southern Quebec. “int” reminds me that the attribute value of each soil type has to be
integer, which was not initially. It was pre-process using the int(raster) in the Raster Calculation tool.

7) An error message may show “failed to open raster” but keep going and it will show a message of
success. Soil map will be shown below (there are only two kinds of soil type so only two colors). Choose
“VALUE” again under “Choose Grid Field”, click “OK”, and the values and percentage of each of two soils
are listed in the “SWAT Soil Classification Table”.
 8) for the soil data base option, I did not create a lookup table because there are too many categories in
the database and too little will be used in each watershed. So we choose “User Soil” and input the soil
names by double clicking a cell under “Name” of the “SWAT Soil Classification Table”. The soil name is
very long and seems none of them match the name in Quebec (further clarification is needed) so we just
simply choose the first two soils for each cell: SHEESCOT and WALLKILL.
9) click “Reclassify” and a success message will be shown, click OK.

Slope:

1) Click “Slope” tab, and click “Multiple Slope”. And in the “Number of Slope Classes” choose “5”. This
means that we will classify the slopes into 5 groups. Set the “Class Upper Limit (%)” for each current
slope class. For example, for the first class, choose 1, and set upper limit to 10, and click “Add”. And
repeat this for second, third, forth, and fifth class for the upper limit of 20, 30, and 40, respectively. It
will be shown below.
2) click “Reclassify” and the slope will be added as a layer onto to the map of the watershed.

Create HRU Feature Class

1) Check “Create HRU Feature Class”, and click “Overlay”. Again, HRU represents hydrological unit. A
message will be shown below and HRU will be added in the watershed. This concludes the setting for
land use, soil, and slope.
2) Define HRU. This step calculates all the values for each HRU (land use code, soil type, and slope). Do
not do anything but just click “Create HRU”. A success message will be popped up. For your information,
those percentages on the figure below asking if you want to remove HRUs with a small fraction of total
area and harmonize them to neighbouring bigger cells.
D. Weather Data (2000-2010)

1) Click “Write Input Tables” tab on ArcSWAT interface and choose “Weather Stations”.

2) Choose “WEGN_user” because other options are only for U.S. watersheds. First Order means U.S. first
order weathers stations (First order means well managed and maybe subsidized by federal government;
COOP are coop weather stations managed by local such as a high school).
3) For each weather component, select “Raingage” for precipitation, “Climate Stations” for temperature,
“Solar gages” for solar radiation, “RH gages” for relative humidity, and “Wind gages” for wind speed. In
one word, do not use simulated because we are out of US and has to download them and manually add
them in. The weather data for ArcSWAT can be downloaded from the “Global Weather data for SWAT”
website (https://globalweather.tamu.edu/). The locations are in the Weather folder. Add them in
individually: Raingages: “pcp.txt”; Temperature: “tmp.txt”; Solar gages: “solar.txt”; Wind Gages:
“wind.txt”.
4) Click OK when completed and after a few seconds a success message below will be shown.

5) Write all input tables. Click “Write SWAT Input Tables” under “Write Input Tables”. A list of tables will
be popped up.
6) click “Select All”, then “Create Tables”. A message asking “Use weather databse to calculate heat unit
to maturity (US only)-> NO. A message will be shown indicating success in bouiding all those data files.
Close “Write SWAT Database Tables”.

E. Run ArcSWAT

1) Click “Run SWAT” under “SWAT Simulation” tab. Note that we skipped Edit SWAT Input because will
not make any changes over the data just added in.
2) set Starting Date “1/1/2000”, Ending Date “12/31/2010”, and SWAT.exe “64-bit” (check your own
computer), “release” (release means the exe released to publich; debug means an inhouse one). Check
“Daily” output. NYSKIP (number of years skipped, warm up period): 3 or 4. The model will use the first 3
or 4 year as warm up and write results for the rest of years.

2) Click “Setup SWAT Run”, then “Run SWAT”. A DOS windown will be shown, as well as a success
message when it is completed:
F. Read the Output

1) Click “Read SWAT Output” under “SWAT Simulation” tab.

2) Check “Output.rch” (rch means reach/channel of the river). Flow data of each reach is stored here.
Then click “Import Files to Database”. “Done writing files to database” message will pop up. Click “OK”.
3) click Open “SWATOutput.mdb” database. The data for each reach now is stored in this database.
4) Double click “rch” under “Tables” on the very left, and all the data will show on the right. There are 7
reaches. The Outflow of the first reach is the the outflow of the whole watersehd.
5) Use the filter to show data for the 2nd reach (SUB #2). The second reach is the last section of the river
network. Click the dropdown triangle on the SUB, and only leave #2 checked under “Number Filters”.
Then all the data shown are from reach #2 ( the last channel of the river network).

6) Copy and paste the “FLOW_OUT cms” (the whole column) onto the excel file with measured flow data
at the outlet.
7) Draw a graph and evaluate the model performance using PBIAS, NSE, RMSE etc.
8) Calibration and validation. Using the first 4 years for calibration and the last 4 years for validation. The
annual flow suggesting that the flow is generally over estimated in particular the baseflow. It might
because too high measured rainfall (about 1500 mm / year). For overestimation in baseflow, R.
Srinivasan suggest 1) to increase deep percolation (GWQMN, in this case *5 will result in reasonable
stream flow); 2) to increase groundwater revap/recharge coefficient (GW_REVAP); 3) Decrease
threshold depth of water in shallow aquifer for revap to occur (REVAPMN).

9) Use the “Manual Calibration Helper” under “SWAT Simulation”, we can adjust those parameters
easily. Let’s try to increase GWQMN by 5 times. Click “All” for subbasins, land uses, soils, and slopes.
Then click “Update Parameter”, and Run SWAT again.

10) The output will be improved significantly in particularly for the first few years. Try to adjust more
parameters to get a better fit for later years.
The END