WRF-Hydro Simulation of the 1960s Drought in the U.S. Delaware River Basin

WRF-Hydro model simulations were conducted to estimate surface water responses to climate and land use in the U.S. Delaware River Basin. WRF-Hydro is a hydrological modeling system developed at The National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR, https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/wrf_hydro). The Delaware River Basin model was cutout from the NOAA National Water Model v2.1 instance of WRF-Hydro, configured with a 1-km resolution Noah-MP land surface model, 250-m resolution terrain routing modules, and streamflow and lake representation on the NHDPlus version 2 stream, waterbody, and catchment network. Details of the NOAA National Water Model WRF-Hydro configuration can be found in Cosgrove et al. 2024 (https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.13184). All model simulations were conduced with WRF-Hydro version 5.3.0 (https://github.com/NCAR/wrf_hydro_nwm_public/releases/tag/v5.3.0).

This dataset includes daily mean streamflow for all NWMv2.1 stream reaches in the Delaware River Basin WRF-Hydro model domain for a scenario with the calibrated National Water Model v2.1 forced with with a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) 4-km resolution reconstruction of the 1960s "drought of record". Land use is based on National Land Cover Data 2016 (https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/5d4c6a1de4b01d82ce8dfd2f) as consistent with the National Water Model v2.1. Model spinup was conducted from 1979-10-01 to 1988-10-01, then the drought scenario launched in 1959-10-01 (with 1988-10-01 starting states) and simulated through 1969-12-31. Model output streamflow and related variables were aggregated from hourly to local (U.S. Eastern Time Zone) day means using R (https://www.r-project.org/).