Soil-Water-Balance forecasted climate model output for simulations of water budget components in the Mississippi Embayment Regional Aquifer System, 2019 to 2055

This data release provides 64 forecasted water budget simulations for the Mississippi Embayment Regional Aquifer System (MERAS) during the period 2019 to 2055. Gridded daily data (1-kilometer resolution) include net infiltration (potential groundwater recharge), rejected net infiltration, interception, runoff, runoff outside (runoff that cannot be routed downslope), irrigation, actual evapotranspiration, minimum and maximum temperatures, and gross precipitation. The gridded representations of water budget components are output from USGS Soil-Water-Balance (SWB) model (Nielsen and Westenbroek, 2023; Westenbroek and Nielsen, 2023) simulations in netcdf4 format, and all water budget components are in inches. The precipitation, maximum air temperature, and minimum air temperature data used as climatic input to the SWB model application were derived from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) projections (Brekke and others, 2013), downscaled using Localized Constructed Analogs (LOCA; Pierce and others, 2014) to a 1/16 degree spatial resolution. The SWB model produced output based on 64 CMIP5 climate projections, half of which are Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and half of which are RCP 8.5 greenhouse gas concentration trajectories. All 64 forecasted climate model outputs can be accessed through the child items: RCP_4_5 and RCP_8_5. Outputs for each climate model scenario are housed in a zipped folder named after the respective climate scenario. Each zipped folder contains ten files: actual_et__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, gross_precipitation__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, interception__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, irrigation__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, net_infiltration__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, rejected_net_infiltration__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, runoff__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, runoff_outside__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, tmax__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc, and tmin__2019-01-01_to_2055-12-31__989_by_661.nc. Further details about the SWB model used to produce the water budget forecasts can be found in Nielsen and Westenbroek (2023).