Vilcanota river watershed Hydrology - Peru: Evolution in a changing climate and soil cover.

Vilcanota river watershed is located in Cusco region in Peruvian Southeast mountain, on the Atlantic slope. This watershed is important for  cities located within the Cusco region, since it supplies water for human consumption and for agricultural and livestock production. Therefore, it is important to understand the hydrological behavior of the watershed, in order to determine water availability for the past, present and future periods, and to be able to make better decisions.

We analyze  evolution of hydrology in the Vilcanota river watershed, with changing climates and ground cover. To achieve the goal, we propose the use of a flexible modeling platform, such as the unified approach to process-based hydrological modeling called Structure for Unifuing Multiple Modeling Alternatives (SUMMA), which contains a general set of conservation equations, providing flexibility to experiment with different spatial representations, different flux parameterizations, different model parameter values ​​and different time stepping schemes. This modeling platform will allow us to reduce the uncertainty in the structure of hydrological models and thus obtain correct results for the right reasons. The historical data, meteorological forcing, and the streamflow measurement data, taken from the Peruvian National Meteorological and Hydrological Service (SENAMHI) database, is  used to run  the model at a subdaily  level. The performance of the model, is evaluated through objective functions  selected to adequately represent the behavior of the hydrology of the watershed, both at high and low flows. allowing us to obtain good results in hydrology projections during wet and dry periods.

Preliminary results show that in the historical data of the watershed there is a slight trend in the increase in runoff, attributed to the change in ground cover.