Streamflow simulation for continental-scale river basins

Abstract This paper presents a methodology for regional parameter estimation of the three-layer Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC-3L) land surface model with the goal of improving the streamflow simulation for river basins in China. This methodology is designed to obtain model parameter estimates from a limited number of calibrated basins and then regionalize them to uncalibrated basins based on climate characteristics and large river basin domains, and ultimately to continental China. Fourteen basins from different climatic zones and large river basins were chosen for model calibration. For each of these basins, seven runoff-related model parameters were calibrated using a systematic manual calibration approach. These calibrated parameters were then transferred within the climate and large river basin zones or climatic zones to the uncalibrated basins. To test the efficiency of the parameter regionalization method, a verification study was conducted on 19 independent river basins in China. Overall, the regionalized parameters, when evaluated against the a priori parameter estimates, were able to reduce the model bias by 0.4%–249.8% and relative root-mean-squared error by 0.2%–119.1% and increase the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency of the streamflow simulation by 1.9%–31.7% for most of the tested basins. The transferred parameters were then used to perform a hydrological simulation over all of China so as to test the applicability of the regionalized parameters on a continental scale. The continental simulation results agree well with the observations at regional scales, indicating that the tested regionalization method is a promising scheme for parameter estimation for ungauged basins in China.

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Continental-Scale River Basins

Sediment Cascades ◽

10.1002/9780470682876.ch13 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 377-402 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David L. Higgitt

Keyword(s):

River Basins ◽

Continental Scale

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Review for “Evaluating the streamflow simulation capability of PERSIANN-CDR daily rainfall products in two river basins on the Tibet Plateau”

10.5194/hess-2016-282-sc1 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Anonymous

Keyword(s):

Daily Rainfall ◽

River Basins ◽

Tibet Plateau ◽

Streamflow Simulation ◽

The Tibet Plateau

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Accelerated continental‐scale snowmelt and ecohydrological impacts in the four largest Siberian river basins in response to spring warming

Hydrological Processes ◽

10.1002/hyp.13844 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 34 (19) ◽

pp. 3867-3881 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Kazuyoshi Suzuki ◽

Tetsuya Hiyama ◽

Koji Matsuo ◽

Kazuhito Ichii ◽

Yoshihiro Iijima ◽

...

Keyword(s):

River Basins ◽

Spring Warming ◽

Siberian River ◽

Continental Scale

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Evaluating the streamflow simulation capability of PERSIANN-CDR daily rainfall products in two river basins on the Tibetan Plateau

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ◽

10.5194/hess-21-169-2017 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 169-181 ◽

Cited By ~ 80

Author(s):

Xiaomang Liu ◽

Tiantian Yang ◽

Koulin Hsu ◽

Changming Liu ◽

Soroosh Sorooshian

Keyword(s):

Tibetan Plateau ◽

River Basin ◽

Yangtze River ◽

Yellow River ◽

Yangtze River Basin ◽

Information Source ◽

River Basins ◽

Hydrologic Model ◽

The Tibetan Plateau ◽

Streamflow Simulation

Abstract. On the Tibetan Plateau, the limited ground-based rainfall information owing to a harsh environment has brought great challenges to hydrological studies. Satellite-based rainfall products, which allow for a better coverage than both radar network and rain gauges on the Tibetan Plateau, can be suitable alternatives for studies on investigating the hydrological processes and climate change. In this study, a newly developed daily satellite-based precipitation product, termed Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks – Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR), is used as input for a hydrologic model to simulate streamflow in the upper Yellow and Yangtze River basins on the Tibetan Plateau. The results show that the simulated streamflows using PERSIANN-CDR precipitation and the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) precipitation are closer to observation than that using limited gauge-based precipitation interpolation in the upper Yangtze River basin. The simulated streamflow using gauge-based precipitation are higher than the streamflow observation during the wet season. In the upper Yellow River basin, gauge-based precipitation, GLDAS precipitation, and PERSIANN-CDR precipitation have similar good performance in simulating streamflow. The evaluation of streamflow simulation capability in this study partly indicates that the PERSIANN-CDR rainfall product has good potential to be a reliable dataset and an alternative information source of a limited gauge network for conducting long-term hydrological and climate studies on the Tibetan Plateau.

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Spatial Patterns in Actual Evapotranspiration Climatologies for Europe

Remote Sensing ◽

10.3390/rs13122410 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (12) ◽

pp. 2410

Author(s):

Simon Stisen ◽

Mohsen Soltani ◽

Gorka Mendiguren ◽

Henrik Langkilde ◽

Monica Garcia ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Spatial Patterns ◽

Land Surface ◽

River Basins ◽

Clear Sky ◽

Continental Scale ◽

Pattern Similarity ◽

Need To Evaluate ◽

Unique Source ◽

Distributed Hydrological Models

Spatial patterns in long-term average evapotranspiration (ET) represent a unique source of information for evaluating the spatial pattern performance of distributed hydrological models on a river basin to continental scale. This kind of model evaluation is getting increased attention, acknowledging the shortcomings of traditional aggregated or timeseries-based evaluations. A variety of satellite remote sensing (RS)-based ET estimates exist, covering a range of methods and resolutions. There is, therefore, a need to evaluate these estimates, not only in terms of temporal performance and similarity, but also in terms of long-term spatial patterns. The current study evaluates four RS-ET estimates at moderate resolution with respect to spatial patterns in comparison to two alternative continental-scale gridded ET estimates (water-balance ET and Budyko). To increase comparability, an empirical correction factor between clear sky and all-weather ET, based on eddy covariance data, is derived, which could be suitable for simple corrections of clear sky estimates. Three RS-ET estimates (MODIS16, TSEB and PT-JPL) and the Budyko method generally display similar spatial patterns both across the European domain (mean SPAEF = 0.41, range 0.25–0.61) and within river basins (mean SPAEF range 0.19–0.38), although the pattern similarity within river basins varies significantly across basins. In contrast, the WB-ET and PML_V2 produced very different spatial patterns. The similarity between different methods ranging over different combinations of water, energy, vegetation and land surface temperature constraints suggests that robust spatial patterns of ET can be achieved by combining several methods.

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On the benefit of high-resolution climate simulations in impact studies of hydrological extremes

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions ◽

10.5194/hessd-6-2573-2009 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 2573-2597 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

R. Dankers ◽

L. Feyen ◽

O. B. Christensen

Keyword(s):

High Resolution ◽

Climate Model ◽

Flood Hazard ◽

River Basins ◽

Horizontal Resolution ◽

Mountainous Regions ◽

Continental Scale ◽

Hydrological Extremes ◽

Climate Simulations ◽

Simulated Precipitation

Abstract. We investigated the effect of changing the horizontal resolution of a regional climate model (RCM) on the simulation of hydrological extremes. We employed the results of three experiments of the RCM HIRHAM using a grid size of approximately 12, 25 and 50 km. These simulations were used to drive the hydrological model LISFLOOD, developed for flood forecasting at European scale. The discharge simulations of LISFLOOD were compared with statistics of observed river runoff at 209 gauging stations across Europe. The largest discrepancies in peak flow occurred in climates with a seasonal snow cover, which may be explained by inaccuracies in the simulated precipitation that accumulate over winter. Although previous studies have found that high resolution climate simulations result in more realistic patterns of extreme precipitation, especially in mountainous regions, we did not find conclusive evidence that the 12-km HIRHAM run generally yields a better simulation of peak discharges. At some gauging stations the model performance is increasing with increasing horizontal resolution of the RCM, while at other stations it is decreasing. However, the differences between the three experiments become less important in larger river basins. Above about 30 000 km2 and 120 000 km2, respectively, the 25- and 50-km runs generally provided a good approximation of the simulations based on the 12-km climatology. Under the A2 scenario of climate change, the changes in extreme discharge levels were similar between the three experiments at continental scale. At the scale of individual river basins, however, there were occasionally important differences. If we assume the 12-km HIRHAM simulation to be more realistic, the use of lower-resolution climate simulations may lead to an underestimation of future flood hazard. This means that results obtained with lower-resolution RCM simulations should be interpreted with care, as the grid scale of the climate model adds to the uncertainty.

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