Virtual watersheds: Simulating the water balance of the Rio Grande basin

The Los Alamos Distributed Hydrologic System (LADHS), a virtual watershed model which contains the essential physics of all elements of a regional hydrospheres and allows feedback between them, is discussed. LADHS emphasizes natural processes, but its components can be extended to include such anthropogenic effects as municipal, industrial, and agricultural demands. The system is embedded in the Parallel Application Work Space (PAWS), a software infrastructure for connecting separate parallel applications with in multicomponent model. LADHS is composed of four interacting components such as a regional atmospheric model, a land-surface hydrology model, a subsurface hydrology model, and a river-routing model.