Water budget components for 17 hydrologic regions of the United States which contain tribal lands and for the tribal lands within each of these regions. All values represent an average year based upon the years 1971-2000, and are the result of a combined analysis of national datasets.

A simple water budget includes precipitation, streamflow, change in storage, evapotranspiration, and residuals: P=Q + ET + ΔS + e. It is essential to include the managed component (i.e., the “human” component) to close the water budget and reduce the magnitude of the residuals from “natural” water budgets. Some of the largest components of managed water withdraws are public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. The modified water budget is: P=Q + ET + ΔS + (PS + Irr + TE) + e, where PS is public supply, Irr is irrigation, and TE is thermoelectric water use. This data release contains both the natural and managed components of the water budget for a region within the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin, GA, U.S. The natural components include precipitation, evapotranspiration, and discharge and the managed components include public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. This table contains HUC 10 IDs, year, the natural components of the water budget, and water-use data aggregated from sites to HUC 10s for the years 2008–2012.

A simple water budget includes precipitation, streamflow, change in storage, evapotranspiration, and residuals: P=Q + ET + ΔS + e. It is essential to include the managed component (i.e., the “human” component) to close the water budget and reduce the magnitude of the residuals from “natural” water budgets. Some of the largest components of managed water withdraws are public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. The modified water budget is: P=Q + ET + ΔS + (PS + Irr + TE) + e, where PS is public supply, Irr is irrigation, and TE is thermoelectric water use. This data release contains both the natural and managed components of the water budget for a region within the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin, GA, U.S. The natural components include precipitation, evapotranspiration, and discharge and the managed components include public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. This table contains HUC 10 IDs, year, the natural components of the water budget, and water-use data aggregated from sites to HUC 10s for the years 2008–2012.

This data release contains the output of the National Hydrologic Hydrologic Model (NHM) version 1.0 aggregated to twelve-digit and ten-digit Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) boundaries contained in the NHDPlus v2.1 dataset. The data are intended to provide "local" water budgets for each HUC boundary as total aggregated streamflow across HUC boundaries is not included. The HUC boundaries are periodically updated; this data release uses HUC boundaries downloaded on 10-26-2020. The NHM outputs aggregated in this release are calibrated using a step-wise calibration procedure to determine optimal parameter set and utilize the Muskingum routing (referred to as byHRU Musk-Obs). See Hay and LaFontaine (2020) for additional information regarding calibration. A spatial weighting technique is used to aggregate the smaller hydrologic response units to the larger HUC boundaries. In this study, spatial weighting functions were adapted from Blodgett (2020) and Blodgett (2019). Because factors such as topography, land use, and flow routing are not included in aggregation, these aggregated values should be viewed as estimates of the spatial mean and used with caution. For instance, calculating flow volumes at the HUC pour points from the spatial mean runoff values would be an approximation due to the lack of routing information. This data release contains: 1) The centroid coordinates for HUC10 and HUC12 boundaries in files named hucXXcoords.csv, where XX indicates the two-digit identifier 2) The area weights for HUC10 and HUC12 boundaries in files named hucXXarea_weights.csv, where XX indicates the two-digit identifier 3) The aggregated monthly and water year budget components for HUC10 and HUC12 boundaries in files named YY_hucXX_budgets.csv, where YY indicates monthly or water year and XX indicates the two-digit identifier 4) a zip folder containing processing scripts called nhm_hru_to_huc12.zip This data release compliments the following related data releases: Blodgett, D.L., 2020, Twelve-digit hydrologic unit actual evapotranspiration and snowpack water equivalent storage from the National Hydrologic Model Infrastructure with the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System 1980-2016: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9IH7CB8. Blodgett, D.L., 2019, Twelve digit hydrologic unit soil moisture and recharge from the National Hydrologic Model Infrastructure with the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9ZZAWK4. This data release uses the following sources of information: 1) NHM 1.0 Geospatial fabric, accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.5066/F7542KMD GIS Features of the Geospatial Fabric for National Hydrologic Modeling 2) NHM 1.0 daily simulation outputs, accessed from the "byHRU_musk_obs.tar" file in this data release: Hay, L.E., and LaFontaine, J.H., 2020, Application of the National Hydrologic Model Infrastructure with the Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System (NHM-PRMS),1980-2016, Daymet Version 3 calibration: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9PGZE0S. 3) The HUC boundaries, downloaded on 10-26-2020, which are accessible here: https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/file/get/60cb5edfd34e86b938a373f4?name=WBD_National_GDB.zip.

A simple water budget includes precipitation, streamflow, change in storage, evapotranspiration, and residuals: P=Q + ET + ΔS + e. It is essential to include the managed component (i.e., the “human” component) to close the water budget and reduce the magnitude of the residuals from “natural” water budgets. Some of the largest components of managed water withdraws are public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. The modified water budget is: P=Q + ET + ΔS + (PS + Irr + TE) + e, where PS is public supply, Irr is irrigation, and TE is thermoelectric water use. This data release contains both the natural and managed components of the water budget for a region within the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River Basin, GA, U.S. The natural components include precipitation, evapotranspiration, and discharge and the managed components include public supply, irrigation, and thermoelectric. This table contains HUC 10 IDs, the natural components of the water budget, and two estimates of the managed components for only the year 2010: (1) water-use data downscaled from counties to HUC 10s and (2) water-use data aggregated from sites to HUC 10s. The county-level data is downloaded directly from the USGS 5-year compilation while the site-specific data is derived from various sources (see further description in the readme).

This data release contains results from a simple monthly water budget that includes water supply and consumptive use for thermoelectric, irrigation, and public supply for 12-digit Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC12) across the conterminous United States for water years 2010-2020. These results were produced using an analysis pipeline that ingests water supply, consumptive use, and routing information and accumulates and routes the water balance through the HUC12 network (Miller and others, 2024; https://doi.org/10.5066/P14MPRDE ). Water budget results also include an assessment of supply and use imbalances within the context of historical climatic conditions to calculate a surface water supply and use index and when considering a range of environmental flow allocation methods.

As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Groundwater Resources Program study of the Appalachian Plateaus aquifers, estimates of annual water-budget components were determined at 849 continuous-record streamflow gaging stations from Mississippi to New York. Base flow, which can serve as a proxy for annual recharge, streamflow, and runoff were estimated from computer programs—PART (Rutledge, 1993), HYSEP (Sloto and Crouse, 1996), and BFI (Wahl and Wahl, 1988)—that are included in the hydrograph analysis component provided with version 1.0 of the U.S. Geological Survey Groundwater Toolbox. Only complete years (January to December) of record at each gage were used to determine annual estimates. Estimates of base-flow index, which is the percentage of streamflow from base flow, are included in the annual and average tables. Precipitation was estimated by calculating the average of cell values in the PRISM dataset intercepted by basin boundaries where previously defined in the GAGES-II dataset (Falcone, 2011). Estimates of evapotranspiration were then calculated from the difference between precipitation and streamflow.

As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Groundwater Resources Program study of the Appalachian Plateaus aquifers, estimates of annual water-budget components were determined at 849 continuous-record streamflow gaging stations from Mississippi to New York. Base flow, which can serve as a proxy for annual recharge, streamflow, and runoff were estimated from computer programs—PART (Rutledge, 1993), HYSEP (Sloto and Crouse, 1996), and BFI (Wahl and Wahl, 1988)—that are included in the hydrograph analysis component provided with version 1.0 of the U.S. Geological Survey Groundwater Toolbox. Only complete years (January to December) of record at each gage were used to determine annual estimates. Estimates of base-flow index, which is the percentage of streamflow from base flow, are included in the annual and average tables. Precipitation was estimated by calculating the average of cell values in the PRISM dataset intercepted by basin boundaries where previously defined in the GAGES-II dataset (Falcone, 2011). Estimates of evapotranspiration were then calculated from the difference between precipitation and streamflow.

As part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Groundwater Resources Program study of the Appalachian Plateaus aquifers, estimates of annual water-budget components were determined at 849 continuous-record streamflow gaging stations from Mississippi to New York. Base flow, which can serve as a proxy for annual recharge, streamflow, and runoff were estimated from computer programs—PART (Rutledge, 1993), HYSEP (Sloto and Crouse, 1996), and BFI (Wahl and Wahl, 1988)—that are included in the hydrograph analysis component provided with version 1.0 of the U.S. Geological Survey Groundwater Toolbox. Only complete years (January to December) of record at each gage were used to determine annual estimates. Estimates of base-flow index, which is the percentage of streamflow from base flow, are included in the annual and average tables. Precipitation was estimated by calculating the average of cell values in the PRISM dataset intercepted by basin boundaries where previously defined in the GAGES-II dataset (Falcone, 2011). Estimates of evapotranspiration were then calculated from the difference between precipitation and streamflow.

The shapefile associated with this metadata file represents the spatial distribution of mean annual water-budget components, in inches, for Hawaii Island, Hawaii. The water-budget components in the shapefile were computed by a water-budget model for a scenario representative of recent conditions (1916-83 rainfall and 2008 land cover), as described in USGS Scientific Investigations Report (SIR) 2011-5078 and summarized in USGS SIR 2015-5164. The model was developed for estimating groundwater recharge and other water-budget components for each subarea of the model. The model-subarea dataset, consisting of 467,805 subareas (polygons), was generated using Esri ArcGIS software by intersecting (merging) multiple spatial datasets. Spatial datasets merged includes those that characterize the spatial distribution of hydrologic and physical conditions (rainfall, fog interception, irrigation, reference evapotranspiration, direct runoff, soil type, and land cover) that the model uses to compute groundwater recharge and other water-budget components. Additional spatial datasets merged into the model-subarea dataset include those of select geographic features that assist in analyzing model results. This metadata file describes the process of merging these spatial datasets. The shapefile attribute information associated with each polygon present an estimate of mean annual rainfall, fog interception, irrigation, runoff, canopy evaporation, actual evapotranspiration, net precipitation, total evapotranspiration, recharge, and leakage from cesspools and water mains. This shapefile also includes select geographic and land-cover attributes of the polygons. Brief descriptions of the water-budget components and attributes are included in this metadata file. Refer to USGS SIR 2011-5078 and USGS SIR 2015-5164 for further details of the methods and sources used to determine these components and attributes.