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www.sea-technology.com March 2016 / st 19 S WAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) is a river basin scale model developed to quan- tify the impact of land management practices in large, complex watersheds. It simulates the quality and quantity of surface and ground wa- ter and predicts the environmental impact of land use, land management practices and cli- mate change. SWAT is a prolonged simulation model not designed for short-period isolated events. It requires on weather and climate, soil, topography, vegetation and land uses. Since SWAT was developed in the early 1990s, it has undergone continuous revisions and expansions, improving its capacities. Al- though SWAT was developed initially to be run under U.S. conditions (e.g., crop growth param- eters), further versions were improved to allow the adjustment of parameters for other coun- tries' conditions. Guadalquivir River Basin To verify the utility of the program for huge estuaries and in an area of Spain with high so- cial impact, the Guadalquivir River Basin (approximately 50,000 sq. km) in southern Spain was identifed as an object of study. Its main river, Guadalquivir, has a length of 656 km and is the ffth longest river of the Iberian Peninsula, fowing into the Gulf of Cádiz (north Atlantic Ocean) through a 110-km, well-mixed navigable river (1,800 sq. km). This watershed shows high inter- annual variability. While some years the fow can reach values over 3,500 m 3 /s, nine-year periods of low hydrological re- gime have been observed that triggered signifcant drought events. The highest an- nual precipitation occurs from October to the beginning of winter, with another maximum during spring months due to the snow melting. It only rains 25 percent of the year in this region, where agriculture is crucial for economic development and agro-industry is the main industrial sector. Soil and Water Assessment Tool SWAT Catchment Model to Assess Guadalquivir River Management By Juan Jesús Gomiz-Pascual • Marina Bolado-Penagos • Dr. Águeda Vázquez (Top) The Guadalquivir River in Andalusia, Spain. (Image Credit: Spanish Ministry of Agriculture.) (Bottom) The SWAT modeled area in southern Spain: A. Digital El- evation Model fle acquired from the European Space Agency; B. Land use acquired from CORINE data set version 1.3 at 100-m res- olution; and C. Soil type map ac- quired from FAO data set version 3.6 at 150 m-resolution.