scholarly journals Can We Calibrate a Daily Time-Step Hydrological Model Using Monthly Time-Step Discharge Data?

Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soham Adla ◽  
Shivam Tripathi ◽  
Markus Disse

Hydrological models are generally calibrated at longer time-steps (monthly, seasonal, or annual) than their computational time-step (daily), because of better calibration performance, lower computational requirements, and the lack of reliable temporally-fine observed discharge data (particularly in developing countries). The consequences of having different calibration and computation time-steps on model performance have not been extensively investigated. This study uses the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to explore the correctness of calibrating a hydrological model at the monthly time-step even if the problem statement is suited to monthly modeling. Multiple SWAT models were set up for an agricultural watershed in the Indo-Gangetic basin. The models were calibrated with observed discharge data of different time-steps (daily and monthly) and were validated on data with the same or different time-steps. Intra- and inter-decadal comparisons were conducted to reinforce the results. The models calibrated on monthly data marginally outperformed the models calibrated on daily data when validated on monthly data, in terms of P- f a c t o r , R- f a c t o r , the coefficient of determination ( R 2 ), and Nash–Sutcliffe Efficiency ( N S E ). However, the monthly-calibrated models performed poorly as compared to daily-calibrated models when validated on daily discharge data. Moreover, the daily simulations from the monthly-calibrated models were unrealistic. Analysis of the calibrated parameters revealed that the daily- and monthly-calibrated models differed significantly in terms of parameters governing channel and groundwater processes. Thus, though the monthly-calibrated model captures the patterns in monthly discharge data fairly well, it fails to characterize daily rainfall-runoff processes. The results challenge the existing practice of using different calibration and computation time-steps in hydrological modeling, and suggest that the two time-steps should be the same, irrespective of the time-step required for modeling.

2020 ◽  

<p>Hydrological modeling of a watershed is necessary for water resources planning and management. The hydrology of upper Ribb watershed has been analyzed using spatially semi-distributed Soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) model. This study aimed to determine the water balance components and its relation with the rainfall which reaches to the surface of the earth. Different spatio-temporal (land use, soil, digital elevation model, climate data, river discharge) data were used for hydrological modelling of Upper Ribb watershed. The applicability of SWAT model in Upper Ribb watershed has been evaluated using coefficient of determination (R2) and Nash Sutcliff efficiency (NSE) parameters. The calibration results revealed the observed data showed a very good agreement with the simulated data with the R2 and NSE values of 0.90 and 0.84 respectively. Similarly, the validation results of streamflow were acceptable with the R2 and NSE values of 0.80 and 0.82 respectively. The monthly average streamflow from Upper Ribb watershed were found 13.39 m3/s. The major portion of the rainfall contributes to the surface runoff due to the major percentage of the watershed is covered with agricultural lands. The groundwater flow was high in forested areas, while evapotranspiration was found very high in water bodies (Ribb reservoir). In this study area the rainfall showed a direct relationship with the streamflow. The ratio of streamflow and evapotranspiration with rainfall was 0.61 and 0.36 respectively. Due to the presence of high amount of surface runoff and evapotranspiration the deep recharge which contributes to the ground water is not that much significant.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Syeda Zehan Farzana ◽  
Md. Abu Zafor ◽  
Jabed Al Shahariar

Water discharge is a significant hydrological parameter because it defines the shape, size and course of the stream. This study was initiated to evaluate the performance and applicability of the physically based SWAT model in analyzing the influence of hydrologic parameters on the streamflow variability and estimation of water balance components at the outlet of Kanaighat streamflow station (SW266) of Surma basin. A 30-m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) has been used to delineate catchment boundary. Land use map obtained from global source GLOBCOVER (Europe Space Agency) has been reclassified to match the SWAT land classes. The model was first calibrated for the period from 2003 to 2008 and then validated for the period from 2009 to 2013 using the observed monthly discharge data. Statistical model performance measures, coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.780, the Nash–Sutcliffe Index (NSI) of 0.47 and Percent bias (PBIAS) of -53.5%, for calibration and 0.878, 0.74 and -31.7%, respectively for validation, indicated good performance of the model simulation on monthly time step. The results showed that SWAT can simulate the hydrologic characteristics of the watershed very well.


Hydrology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Ahmed Naseh Ahmed Hamdan ◽  
Suhad Almuktar ◽  
Miklas Scholz

It has become necessary to estimate the quantities of runoff by knowing the amount of rainfall to calculate the required quantities of water storage in reservoirs and to determine the likelihood of flooding. The present study deals with the development of a hydrological model named Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC-HMS), which uses Digital Elevation Models (DEM). This hydrological model was used by means of the Geospatial Hydrologic Modeling Extension (HEC-GeoHMS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to identify the discharge of the Al-Adhaim River catchment and embankment dam in Iraq by simulated rainfall-runoff processes. The meteorological models were developed within the HEC-HMS from the recorded daily rainfall data for the hydrological years 2015 to 2018. The control specifications were defined for the specified period and one day time step. The Soil Conservation Service-Curve number (SCS-CN), SCS Unit Hydrograph and Muskingum methods were used for loss, transformation and routing calculations, respectively. The model was simulated for two years for calibration and one year for verification of the daily rainfall values. The results showed that both observed and simulated hydrographs were highly correlated. The model’s performance was evaluated by using a coefficient of determination of 90% for calibration and verification. The dam’s discharge for the considered period was successfully simulated but slightly overestimated. The results indicated that the model is suitable for hydrological simulations in the Al-Adhaim river catchment.


Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Majid Fereidoon ◽  
Manfred Koch ◽  
Luca Brocca

Hydrological models are widely used for many purposes in water sector projects, including streamflow prediction and flood risk assessment. Among the input data used in such hydrological models, the spatial-temporal variability of rainfall datasets has a significant role on the final discharge estimation. Therefore, accurate measurements of rainfall are vital. On the other hand, ground-based measurement networks, mainly in developing countries, are either nonexistent or too sparse to capture rainfall accurately. In addition to in-situ rainfall datasets, satellite-derived rainfall products are currently available globally with high spatial and temporal resolution. An innovative approach called SM2RAIN that estimates rainfall from soil moisture data has been applied successfully to various regions. In this study, first, soil moisture content derived from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth observing system (AMSR-E) is used as input into the SM2RAIN algorithm to estimate daily rainfall (SM2R-AMSRE) at different sites in the Karkheh river basin (KRB), southwest Iran. Second, the SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) hydrological model was applied to simulate runoff using both ground-based observed rainfall and SM2R-AMSRE rainfall as input. The results reveal that the SM2R-AMSRE rainfall data are, in most cases, in good agreement with ground-based rainfall, with correlations R ranging between 0.58 and 0.88, though there is some underestimation of the observed rainfall due to soil moisture saturation not accounted for in the SM2RAIN equation. The subsequent SWAT-simulated monthly runoff from SM2R-AMSRE rainfall data (SWAT-SM2R-AMSRE) reproduces the observations at the six gauging stations (with coefficient of determination, R² > 0.71 and NSE > 0.56), though with slightly worse performances in terms of bias (Bias) and root-mean-square error (RMSE) and, again, some systematic flow underestimation compared to the SWAT model with ground-based rainfall input. Additionally, rainfall estimates of two satellite products of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), 3B42 and 3B42RT, are used in the calibrated SWAT- model after bias correction. The monthly runoff predictions obtained with 3B42- rainfall have 0.42 < R2 < 0.72 and−0.06 < NSE < 0.74 which are slightly better than those obtained with 3B42RT- rainfall, but not as good as the SWAT-SM2R-AMSRE. Therefore, despite the aforementioned limitations, using SM2R-AMSRE rainfall data in a hydrological model like SWAT appears to be a viable approach in basins with limited ground-based rainfall data.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Etienne Foulon ◽  
Alain N. Rousseau ◽  
Eduardo J. Scarpari Spolidorio ◽  
Kian Abbasnezhadi

&lt;p&gt;High-resolution data are readily available and used more than ever in hydrological modeling, despite few investigations demonstrating the added value. Nonetheless, a few studies have looked into the benefits of using increased spatial resolution data with the widely-used, semi-distributed, SWAT model. Meanwhile, far too little attention has been paid to the physically-based, semi-distributed, hydrological model HYDROTEL which is widely used for hydrological forecasting and hydroclimatic studies in Quebec, Canada. In a preliminary study, we demonstrated that increasing the spatial resolution of the digital elevation model (DEM) had a significant impact on the discretization of a watershed into hillslopes (i.e., computational units of HYDROTEL), and on their topographic attributes (slope, elevation and area). Accordingly, values of the calibration parameters were also substantially affected; whereas model performance was slightly improved for high- and low-flows only. This is why, we hereby propose the systematic assessment of HYDROTEL with respect to the resolution of the spatiotemporal computational domain for a specific physiographic scale. This investigation was conducted for the 350-km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; St. Charles River watershed, Quebec, Canada. The DEM used was derived from LiDAR data and aggregated at 20&amp;#160;m. Due to a lack of accurate precipitation information at time scales less than 24&amp;#160;hr, data from the high resolution deterministic precipitation analysis system, CaPA-HRDPA, were used to generate various time steps (6, 8, 12, and 24 hr) and to control results obtained from observed data. This approach, recently applied to three watersheds in Yukon, proved to be an excellent alternative to calibrate a hydrological model in a region known as a hydometeorological desert (see EGU 2020 presentation of Abbasnezhadi and Rousseau). The number of computational units ranged between 5 to 684 hillslopes, with mean areas ranging from 75 km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; to 0.5 km&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. HYDROTEL was automatically calibrated over the 2013-2018 period using PADDS. We combined the Kling Gupta Efficiency and the log-transformed Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency to ensure good seasonal and annual representations of the hydrographs. The 12 most sensitive calibration parameters were adjusted using 150 optimisation trials with 150 repetitions each. Behavioral parameters were used to assess uncertainty and ensuing equifinality. All scenarios were evaluated using flow duration curves, performance indicators (RMSE, % Bias) and hydrograph analyses. In addition, quantitative analyses were done with respect to physiographic features such as: length of river segments, hillslopes, and sub-watershed boundaries for each resolution. We believe this study provides the needed systematic framework to assess trade-offs between spatiotemporal resolutions and modeling performances that can be achieved with HYDROTEL. Moreover, the use of various numbers of CaPA-HRDPA stations for model calibration has allowed us to determine the number of precipitation stations needed to achieve a given performance threshold.&lt;/p&gt;


Author(s):  
X. Cui ◽  
W. Sun ◽  
J. Teng ◽  
H. Song ◽  
X. Yao

Abstract. Calibration of hydrological models in ungauged basins is now a hot research topic in the field of hydrology. In addition to the traditional method of parameter regionalization, using discontinuous flow observations to calibrate hydrological models has gradually become popular in recent years. In this study, the possibility of using a limited number of river discharge data to calibrate a distributed hydrological model, the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), was explored. The influence of the quantity of discharge measurements on model calibration in the upper Heihe Basin was analysed. Calibration using only one year of daily discharge measurements was compared with calibration using three years of discharge data. The results showed that the parameter values derived from calibration using one year’s data could achieve similar model performance with calibration using three years’ data, indicating that there is a possibility of using limited numbers of discharge data to calibrate the SWAT model effectively in poorly gauged basins.


2020 ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nguyen Kim Loi ◽  
Vo Ngoc Quynh Tram ◽  
Nguyen Thi Tinh Au

Climate is the main factor affecting hydrology in a watershed. For purely agricultural watershed, hydrological assessment and management play a very important role in the region's agricultural development. In this study, the hydrological was simulated by the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. This paper aimed to calibrate and validate the SWAT model in Dak B’la watershed in Central Highland Vietnam and assess the climate change on water discharge. The coefficient of determination (R²) and Nash-Sutcliffe index (NSI), and Percent BIAS (PBIAS) during the calibration process was 0.75, 0.72, and -1.15 respectively and validation process was 0.82, 0.83, 3.67 respectively. It proved the high reliability of the SWAT model after calibration. The two climate scenarios were selected in this investigation: scenario A is the existing climate using the data from 2001 to 2018 and scenario B is the A1B emission scenario for the future period from 2020 to 2069. Compared to the average water discharge from 2001-2018 and average water discharge from 2020 to 2069, the results indicated that climate change increases the average water discharge (0.55%), especially in 2050, the water discharge in the flood season (in November) is 584 m3/s, which higher than the largest flood in 2009 of 450 m3/s.


Author(s):  
Mohammad I. Hatamleh ◽  
Jagannathan Mahadevan ◽  
Arif Malik ◽  
Dong Qian

The single explicit analysis using time-dependent damping (SEATD) technique for laser shock peening (LSP) simulation employs variable damping to relax the excited model between laser shots, thus distinguishing it from conventional optimum constant damping methods. Dynamic relaxation (DR) is the well-established conventional technique that mathematically identifies the optimum constant damping coefficient and incremental time-step that guarantees stability and convergence while damping all mode shapes uniformly when bringing a model to quasi-static equilibrium. Examined in this research is a new systematic procedure to strive for a more effective, time-dependent variable damping profile for general LSP configurations and boundary conditions, based on excited modal parameters of a given laser-shocked system. The effects of increasing the number of mode shapes and selecting modes by contributed effective masses are studied, and a procedure to identify the most efficient variable damping profile is designed. Two different simulation cases are studied. It is found that the computational time is reduced by up to 25% (62.5 min) for just five laser shots using the presented variable damping method versus conventional optimum constant damping. Since LSP typically involved hundreds of shots, the accumulated savings in computation time during prediction of desired process parameters is significant.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 13955-13978 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. A. Shawul ◽  
T. Alamirew ◽  
M. O. Dinka

Abstract. To utilize water resources in a sustainable manner, it is necessary to understand the quantity and quality in space and time. This study was initiated to evaluate the performance and applicability of the physically based Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model in analyzing the influence of hydrologic parameters on the streamflow variability and estimation of monthly and seasonal water yield at the outlet of Shaya mountainous watershed. The calibrated SWAT model performed well for simulation of monthly streamflow. Statistical model performance measures, coefficient of determination (r2) of 0.71, the Nash–Sutcliffe simulation efficiency (ENS) of 0.71 and percent difference (D) of 3.69, for calibration and 0.76, 0.75 and 3.30, respectively for validation, indicated good performance of the model simulation on monthly time step. Mean monthly and annual water yield simulated with the calibrated model were found to be 25.8 mm and 309.0 mm, respectively. Overall, the model demonstrated good performance in capturing the patterns and trend of the observed flow series, which confirmed the appropriateness of the model for future scenario simulation. Therefore, SWAT model can be taken as a potential tool for simulation of the hydrology of unguaged watershed in mountainous areas, which behave hydro-meteorologically similar with Shaya watershed. Future studies on Shaya watershed modeling should address the issues related to water quality and evaluate best management practices.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-846 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ottar Tamm ◽  
Andres Luhamaa ◽  
Toomas Tamm

Climate change is altering temperature, precipitation, and other climatic parameters, affecting sectors dependent on water resources, e.g. energy production. The purpose of this study is to analyze the possible influences of climate change on hydropower potential in North Estonia. In Estonian run-of-river hydropower plants, energy comes mainly from water volume. Thus, changes in hydropower production are related to changes in river runoff. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is used to study runoff responses to climate change in Kunda, Keila and Valgejõe river basins. A sequential uncertainty fitting algorithm is used for calibration and validation of hydrological models. Two modeling studies from EURO-CORDEX high-resolution simulations are used: RACMO regional climate model (RCM) from the Netherlands (KNMI) and HIRHAM5 RCM from Denmark (DMI). Hydrological model efficiency is evaluated with coefficient of determination (R2), Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and percent bias (PBIAS). The NSE values range from 0.71 to 0.77 during calibration and validation. The PBIAS reveals no significant bias. Daily discharge data of the baseline period (1971–2000) and the future period (2071–2100) for KNMI and DMI scenarios reveal an overall increase in hydropower potential. Larger changes are predicted by the DMI model, while KNMI prediction is lower, 25% and 45% respectively.


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