Integrating operational watershed and coastal models for the Iberian Coast: Watershed model implementation – A first approach.

River discharges and loads are essential inputs to coastal seas, and thus for coastal seas modelling, and their properties are the result of all activities and policies carried inland. For these reasons main rivers were object of intense monitoring programs having been generated some important amount of historical data. Due to the decline in the Portuguese hydrometric network and in order to quantify and forecast surface water streamflow and nutrients to coastal areas, the MOHID Land model was applied to the Western Iberia Region with a 2 km horizontal resolution and to the Iberian Peninsula with 10 km horizontal resolution. The domains were populated with land use and soil properties and forced with existing meteorological models. This approach also permits to understand how the flows and loads are generated and to forecast their values which are of utmost importance to perform coastal ocean and estuarine forecasts. The final purpose of the implementation is to obtain fresh water quantity and quality that could be used to support management decisions in the watershed, reservoirs and also to estuaries and coastal areas.

A process oriented model as MOHID Land is essential to perform this type of simulations, as the model is independent of the number of river catchments. In this work, the Mohid Land model equations and parameterisations were described and an innovative methodology for watershed modelling is presented and validated for a large international river, the Tagus River, and the largest national river of Portugal, the Mondego River. Precipitation, streamflow and nutrients modelling results for these two rivers were compared with observations near their coastal outlet in order to evaluate the model capacity to represent the main watershed trends. Finally, an annual budget of fresh water and nutrient transported by the main twenty five rivers discharging in the Portuguese coast is presented.