Simulating the Impact of Drought on California’s Central Valley Hydrology, Groundwater and Cropping

Abstract

This paper describes an efficient methodology to link a comprehensive, distributed hydrologic model for California’s Central Valley to a crop production model. The resulting hydro-economic model allows for the dynamic calculation of crop acreages in response to water availability without simplifying groundwater or stream flow dynamics by the assumption of linearity or by resorting to a lumped-parameter approach.