Articles | Volume 20, issue 6
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-2207-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-20-2207-2016
Research article
 | 
08 Jun 2016
Research article |  | 08 Jun 2016

Representation of spatial and temporal variability in large-domain hydrological models: case study for a mesoscale pre-Alpine basin

Lieke Melsen, Adriaan Teuling, Paul Torfs, Massimiliano Zappa, Naoki Mizukami, Martyn Clark, and Remko Uijlenhoet

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Cited articles

Abbaspour, K., Yang, J., Maximov, I., Siber, R., Bogner, K., Mieleitner, J., Zobrist, J., and Srinivasan, R.: Modelling hydrology and water quality in the pre-alpine/alpine Thur watershed using SWAT, J. Hydrol., 333, 413–430, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2006.09.014, 2007.
Adams, R., Western, A., and Seed, A.: An analysis of the impact of spatial variability in rainfall on runoff and sediment predictions from a distributed model, Hydrol. Process., 26, 3263–3280, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.8435, 2012.
Andersen, O., Seneviratne, S., Hinderer, J., and Viterbo, P.: GRACE-derived terrestrial water storage depletion associated with the 2003 European heat wave, Geophys. Res. Let., 32, L18405, https://doi.org/10.1029/2005GL023574, 2005.
Becker, A. and Grünewald, U.: Flood risk in Central Europe, Science, 300, 1099, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1083624, 2003.
Bennett, J., Robertson, D., Ward, P., Hapuarachchi, H., and Wang, Q.: Calibrating hourly rainfall-runoff models with daily forcings for streamflow forecasting applications in meso-scale catchments, Environ. Model. Softw., 76, 20–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.11.006, 2016.
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Short summary
In this study we investigated the sensitivity of a large-domain hydrological model for spatial and temporal resolution. We evaluated the results on a mesoscale catchment in Switzerland. Our results show that the model was hardly sensitive for the spatial resolution, which implies that spatial variability is likely underestimated. Our results provide a motivation to improve the representation of spatial variability in hydrological models in order to increase their credibility on a smaller scale.
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