• Journal of The Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers
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• v.47 no.4
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• pp.65-74
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• 2005

AnnAGNPS model was applied to a catchment mainly occupied with bushland for modeling non-point source pollution. Since the single event model cannot handle events longer than 24 hours duration, the event-based calibration was carried out using the continuous mode. As event flows affect sediment and nutrient generation and transport, the calibration of the model was performed in three steps: Hydrologic, Sediment and Nutrient calibrations. The results from hydrologic calibration for the catchment indicate a good prediction of the model with average ARE(Absolute Relative Error) of $24.6\%$ fur the runoff volume and $12\%$ for the peak flow. For the sediment calibration, the average ARE was $198.8\%$ indicating acceptable model performance for the sediment prediction. The predicted TN(Total Nitrogen) and TP(Total Phosphorus) were also found to be acceptable as the average ARE for TN and TP were $175.5\%\;and\;126.5\%$, respectively. The AnnAGNPS model was therefore approved to be appropriate to model non-point source pollution in bushland catchments. In general, the model was likely to result in underestimation for the larger events and overestimation fur the smaller events for the water quality predictions. It was also observed that the large errors in the hydrologic prediction also produced high errors in sediment and nutrient prediction. This was probably due to error propagation in which the error in the hydrologic prediction influenced the generation of error in the water quality prediction. Accurate hydrologic calibration should be hence obtained for a reliable water quality prediction.