Development of soil and land cover databases for use in the Soil Water Assessment Tool from Irish National Soil Maps and CORINE Land Cover Maps for Ireland

Abstract

Abstract. Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) are being extensively used by hydrologists and environmentalists to simulate river discharge and water quality at watershed/basin scale across the world. The SWAT is a physically based semi-distributed rainfall runoff model and require watershed related characteristics (elevation, land cover, and soil information for the entire river basin) and meteorological variables (rainfall, temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and windspeed) information to simulation runoff and water quality data at the basin outlet. One drawback of SWAT is that the default database for the model is available for United States and the modeller needs to develop a separate database to implement the model at river basins located outside the USA. This study generates soil and landcover database that can be used for the SWAT modelling for river basins located in Ireland. The soil database has been created based on soil testing experiments conducted during the STRIVE programme by Teagasc and Environmental Protection Agency Ireland. The landcover database has been created by relating the landcover data obtained from the CORINE database with the default SWAT landcover database. Furthermore, detailed information on the five meteorological data covering Ireland has been provided. A newly created SWAT geodatabase has been generated that can be used as a replacement from the default SWAT database for simulating runoff and water quality at river basins in Ireland. The database contains digital elevation model, soil and landcover maps along with river network and river subbasins for Ireland and is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4767926 (Basu, 2021).