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- Title
Sensitivity of hydrological model to the temporal and spatial resolutions of rainfall input.
- Authors
Yingchun Huang; Bárdossy, András; Ke Zhang
- Abstract
As the most important input for rainfall-runoff models, precipitation is usually observed at specific sites on a daily or sub-daily time scale and requires interpolation for further application. This study aims to explore that for a given objective function, whether a higher temporal and spatial resolution of precipitation could provide an improvement in model performance. Four different gridded hourly and daily precipitation datasets, with a spatial resolution of 1km*1km for the Baden-Wurttemberg state of Germany, were constructed using a combination of data from a dense network of daily rainfall stations and a less dense network of pluviometers with high temporal-resolution rainfall observations. Two different flavors of HBV models with different model structures, lumped and spatially distributed, were used to test the sensitivity of model performance on the spatial resolution of precipitation. For four selected mesoscale catchments located at the upstream region of Baden-Wurttemberg, these four precipitation datasets were used to simulate the daily discharges using both lumped and semi-distributed HBV models. Different possibilities of improving the accuracy of daily streamflow prediction were investigated. Three main results were obtained from this study: (1) a higher temporal resolution of precipitation improved the model performance if the observation density was high; (2) a combination of observed high temporal-resolution observations with disaggregated daily precipitation leads to a further improvement in the model performance; (3) for the present research, the increase of spatial resolution improved the performance of the model insubstantially or only marginally for most of the study catchments.
- Subjects
RAINFALL; RUNOFF; HYDROLOGIC cycle; METEOROLOGICAL precipitation; CLIMATOLOGY
- Publication
Hydrology & Earth System Sciences Discussions, 2018, p1
- ISSN
1812-2108
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5194/hess-2018-469