DRAINMOD Modeling for Norwegian Agricultural Catchments

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

My MSc thesis at Wageningen University looked at a straightforward question that turned out to be surprisingly complex: how does water actually move through an agricultural catchment in Norway?

I used DRAINMOD, a hydrological model originally built for poorly drained soils. It’s used worldwide for drainage system design, but mostly at field scale. My work was about whether you could push it to catchment scale and whether it made sense for Norwegian conditions—mixed agriculture and forest, hilly terrain, freeze-thaw cycles, the Nordic whole picture.

The model let me run numerical experiments on soil properties, drain spacing, surface storage, lateral conductivity, and the temperature thresholds that matter when ground freezes and thaws. What I found was that drain spacing and lateral hydraulic conductivity were the two things that actually controlled the water balance. Surface storage mattered for peak flow. The model worked well enough for sensitivity analysis—you could see which levers moved the system—but it struggled with the hilly terrain and all the spatial complexity a real Norwegian catchment throws at you.

Was DRAINMOD useful? Yes, for understanding how the system behaves. Did it perfectly capture Norwegian drainage? No. The model was built for field-scale applications in flat agricultural areas, not for the messy reality of a mixed landscape with complicated topography.

The thesis sits below if you want the full technical details.

DRAINMOD | Timon Weitkamp | No Worries, Just Maps

DRAINMOD Modeling for Norwegian Agricultural Catchments

Read the Thesis