References

HESS

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

HESS

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

1607-7938

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/hess-17-4143-2013

Distributed hydrologic modeling of a sparsely monitored basin in Sardinia, Italy, through hydrometeorological downscaling

Mascaro

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4516-1206

³ ² ¹ Piras

³ ² Deidda

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5469-0199

³ ² Vivoni

E. R.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-9459

¹ ⁴

School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Ambientale ed Architettura, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Fisica delle Atmosfere e delle Idrosfere, Tolentino, Italy

School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

24 10 2013

17 10 4143 4158

2013

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/17/4143/2013/hess-17-4143-2013.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/17/4143/2013/hess-17-4143-2013.pdf

The water resources and hydrologic extremes in Mediterranean basins are heavily influenced by climate variability. Modeling these watersheds is difficult due to the complex nature of the hydrologic response as well as the sparseness of hydrometeorological observations. In this work, we present a strategy to calibrate a distributed hydrologic model, known as TIN-based Real-time Integrated Basin Simulator (tRIBS), in the Rio Mannu basin (RMB), a medium-sized watershed (472.5 km<sup>2</sup>) located in an agricultural area in Sardinia, Italy. In the RMB, precipitation, streamflow and meteorological data were collected within different historical periods and at diverse temporal resolutions. We designed two statistical tools for downscaling precipitation and potential evapotranspiration data to create the hourly, high-resolution forcing for the hydrologic model from daily records. Despite the presence of several sources of uncertainty in the observations and model parameterization, the use of the disaggregated forcing led to good calibration and validation performances for the tRIBS model, when daily discharge observations were available. The methodology proposed here can be also used to disaggregate outputs of climate models and conduct high-resolution hydrologic simulations with the goal of quantifying the impacts of climate change on water resources and the frequency of hydrologic extremes within medium-sized basins.

European Commission

CLIMB - Climate Induced Changes on the Hydrology of Mediterranean Basins: Reducing Uncertainty and Quantifying Risk through an Integrated Monitoring and Modeling System (244151)

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