Calibration of the Parameters of a Rainfall-Runoff Model in Ungauged Basins Using Synthetic Flow Duration Curves as Estimated by Regional Analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 1617-1626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviane Borda Pinheiro ◽  
Mauro Naghettini
Author(s):  
Hiroki Momiyama ◽  
Tomo'omi Kumagai ◽  
Tomohiro Egusa

In Japan, there has recently been an increasing call for forest thinning to conserve water resources from forested mountain catchments in terms of runoff during prolonged drought periods of the year. How their water balance and the resultant runoff are altered by forest thinning is examined using a combination of 8-year hydrological observations, 100-year meteorological data generator output, and a semi-process-based rainfall-runoff model. The rainfall-runoff model is developed based on TOPMODEL assuming that forest thinning has an impact on runoff primarily through an alteration in canopy interception. The main novelty in this analysis is that the availability of the generated 100-year meteorological data allows the investigations of the forest thinning impacts on mountain catchment water resources under the most severer drought conditions. The model is validated against runoff observations conducted at a forested mountain catchment in the Kanto region of Japan for the period 2010–2017. It is demonstrated that the model reproduces temporal variations in runoff and evapotranspiration at inter- and intra-annual time scales, resulting in well reproducing the observed flow duration curves. On the basis of projected flow duration curves for the 100-year, despite the large increase in an annual total runoff with ordinary intensifying thinning, low flow rates, i.e., water resources from the catchment in the drought period in the year, in both normal and drought years were impacted by the forest thinning to a lesser extent. Higher catchment water retention capacity appreciably enhanced the forest thinning effect on increasing available water resources.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (9) ◽  
pp. 999-1008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio J.C. Blanco ◽  
Yves Secretan ◽  
Anne-Catherine Favre

In Amazonia, because the small catchments are ungauged, it is not possible to analyse them, for example, for hydroelectric power production. Thus, the objective of this paper is to study the transferability of a rainfall–runoff model to simulate flow duration curves for the production of hydroelectric power. The approach is based on the transfer of the impulse response of a model calibrated on two gauged catchments, allowing the evaluation approach permutation between these two catchments. We have, respectively, 7 years and 2 years and 2 months of rainfall and runoff data for these catchments. A sensitivity analysis of the transferability calibration to the sample size is carried out to determine the shortest flow period gauged on the receptor catchment, which produces results comparable to those calibrated with the maximum samples size. This analysis evaluates fieldwork on the ungauged sites of the region.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 5647-5661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daeha Kim ◽  
Il Won Jung ◽  
Jong Ahn Chun

Abstract. Rainfall–runoff modelling has long been a special subject in hydrological sciences, but identifying behavioural parameters in ungauged catchments is still challenging. In this study, we comparatively evaluated the performance of the local calibration of a rainfall–runoff model against regional flow duration curves (FDCs), which is a seemingly alternative method of classical parameter regionalisation for ungauged catchments. We used a parsimonious rainfall–runoff model over 45 South Korean catchments under semi-humid climate. The calibration against regional FDCs was compared with the simple proximity-based parameter regionalisation. Results show that transferring behavioural parameters from gauged to ungauged catchments significantly outperformed the local calibration against regional FDCs due to the absence of flow timing information in the regional FDCs. The behavioural parameters gained from observed hydrographs were likely to contain intangible flow timing information affecting predictability in ungauged catchments. Additional constraining with the rising limb density appreciably improved the FDC calibrations, implying that flow signatures in temporal dimensions would supplement the FDCs. As an alternative approach in data-rich regions, we suggest calibrating a rainfall–runoff model against regionalised hydrographs to preserve flow timing information. We also suggest use of flow signatures that can supplement hydrographs for calibrating rainfall–runoff models in gauged and ungauged catchments.


Hydrology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nag ◽  
Biswal

Construction of flow duration curves (FDCs) is a challenge for hydrologists as most streams and rivers worldwide are ungauged. Regionalization methods are commonly followed to solve the problem of discharge data scarcity by transforming hydrological information from gauged basins to ungauged basins. As a consequence, regionalization-based FDC predictions are not very reliable where discharge data are scarce quantitatively and/or qualitatively. In such a scenario, it is perhaps more meaningful to use a calibration-free rainfall‒runoff model that can exploit easily available meteorological information to predict FDCs in ungauged basins. This hypothesis is tested in this study by comparing a well-known regionalization-based model, the inverse distance weighting (IDW) model, with the recently proposed calibration-free dynamic Budyko model (DB) in a region where discharge observations are not only insufficient quantitatively but also show apparent signs of observational errors. The DB model markedly outperformed the IDW model in the study region. Furthermore, the IDW model’s performance sharply declined when we randomly removed discharge gauging stations to test the model in a variety of data availability scenarios. The analysis here also throws some light on how errors in observational datasets and drainage area influence model performance and thus provides a better picture of the relative strengths of the two models. Overall, the results of this study support the notion that a calibration-free rainfall‒runoff model can be chosen to predict FDCs in discharge data-scarce regions. On a philosophical note, our study highlights the importance of process understanding for the development of meaningful hydrological models.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Dal Molin ◽  
Dmitri Kavetski ◽  
Mario Schirmer ◽  
Fabrizio Fenicia

<p>One of the open challenges in catchment hydrology is prediction in ungauged basins (PUB), i.e. being able to predict catchment responses (typically streamflow) when measurements are not available. One of the possible approaches to this problem consists in calibrating a model using catchment response statistics (called signatures) that can be estimated at the ungauged site.<br>An important challenge of any approach to PUB is to produce reliable and precise predictions of catchment response, with an accurate estimation of the uncertainty. In the context of PUB through calibration on regionalized streamflow signatures, there are multiple sources of uncertainty that affect streamflow predictions, which relate to:</p><ul><li>The use streamflow signatures, which, by synthetizing the underlying time series, reduce the information available for model calibration;</li> <li>The regionalization of streamflow signatures, which are not observed, but estimated through some signature regionalization model;</li> <li>The use of a rainfall-runoff model, which carries uncertainties related to input data, parameter values, and model structure.</li> </ul><p>This study proposes an approach that separately accounts for the uncertainty related to the regionalization of the signatures from the other types; the implementation uses Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) to infer the parameters of the rainfall-runoff model using stochastic streamflow signatures. <br>The methodology is tested in six sub-catchments of the Thur catchment in Switzerland; results show that the regionalized model produces streamflow time series that are similar to the ones obtained by the classical time-domain calibration, with slightly higher uncertainty but similar fit to the observed data. These results support the proposed approach as a viable method for PUB, with a focus on the correct estimation of the uncertainty.</p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 3961-3992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y. Yokoo ◽  
M. Sivapalan

Abstract. In this paper we investigate the climatic and landscape controls on the flow duration curve (FDC) with the use of a physically-based rainfall-runoff model. The FDC is a stochastic representation of within-year variability of runoff, which arises from the transformation, by the catchment, of within-year variability of precipitation that can itself be characterized by a corresponding duration curve for precipitation (PFDC). Numerical simulations are carried out with the rainfall-runoff model under a variety of combinations of climatic inputs (i.e., precipitation, potential evaporation, including their within-year variability) and landscape properties (i.e., soil type and depth). The simulations indicated that the FDC can be disaggregated into two components, with sharply differing characteristics and origins: the FDC for surface (fast) runoff (SFDC) and the FDC for subsurface (slow) runoff (SSFDC). SFDC closely tracked PFDC and can be approximated with the use of a simple, nonlinear (threshold) filter model. On the other hand, SSFDC tracked the FDC that is constructed from the regime curve (ensemble mean within-year variation of streamflow), which can be closely approximated by a linear filter model. Sensitivity analyses were carried out to understand the climate and landscape controls on each component, gaining useful physical insights into their respective shapes. In particular the results suggested that evaporation from dynamic saturated areas, especially in the dry season, can contribute to a sharp dip at the lower tail of the FDCs. Based on these results, we develop a conceptual framework for the reconstruction of FDCs in ungauged basins. This framework partitions the FDC into: (1) a fast flow component, governed by a filtered version of PFDC, (2) a slow flow component governed by the regime curve, and (3) a correction to SSFDC to capture the effects of high evapotranspiration at low flows.


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