Evaluating seasonal hydrological extremes in mesoscale (pre-)Alpine basins at coarse 0.5° and fine hyperresolution

Buitink, Joost; Uijlenhoet, Remko; Teuling, Adriaan J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1593-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1593-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1593-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

Research article

|

19 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 19 Mar 2019

Evaluating seasonal hydrological extremes in mesoscale (pre-)Alpine basins at coarse 0.5° and fine hyperresolution

Joost Buitink, Remko Uijlenhoet, and Adriaan J. Teuling

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Mar 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Aug 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Revision hess-2018-407', Davide Zoccatelli, 29 Oct 2018
- SC1: 'Authors response to Davide Zoccatelli', Joost Buitink, 30 Oct 2018
- AC1: 'Detailed response to Davide Zoccatelli', Joost Buitink, 07 Nov 2018
SC2: 'Review and reflections', Staffan Druid, 10 Nov 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Staffan Druid', Joost Buitink, 12 Nov 2018
RC2: 'Referee Comment', Anonymous Referee #2, 26 Nov 2018
- AC3: 'Detailed response to Anonymous Referee #2', Joost Buitink, 28 Nov 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (29 Nov 2018) by Nadav Peleg

AR by Joost Buitink on behalf of the Authors (30 Nov 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 Dec 2018) by Nadav Peleg

RR by Davide Zoccatelli (01 Mar 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors did an effort in addressing the issues risen in the last review, and I think that this improved the clarity of the message conveyed by the paper. I acknowledge that the modifications went in the right direction, and I think that the paper needs only a few more changes before publication.

- The literature on the subject of scale issue in distributed hydrological modelling is still very poor. At P2L16 you cite a long list studies on “the effect of model resolution” without mentioning what they did and what the findings are. Same at page 2 line 25, another list of studies without saying what they did, what they found and how they relate with your case. Please have a look at studies analyzing the effect of model resolution on extremes, and at the very broad literature comparing lumped and distributed models – which is exactly what you are doing in your study and have results almost identical to yours. In the discussion and conclusions the relation with the literature, and with resolution in hydrological modelling, is largely missing.

- I still have some issue with the ambiguity of meaning in the DWD metric, but I appreciate the update of the DWD definition, and the advise to use it in relation with the violin plots – which are more informative. One note, at P19L29, “to quantify the difference between the high and low resolution model, and indicated that the low resolution model misses on average more than 2 standardized anomalies compared to the high resolution.” Here I have issues with “quantify the difference” - since as you said before the intended use is to quantify the variability of high-res, and with “misses” - since the low res is always within the variability range of the high res, often representing it well and on average being less than 1 standardized anomaly away (Fig.9). I’m actually impressed that the lumped model performs relatively well for runoff anomaly.

- From the abstract: “DWD values show that the hydrological response simulated with a high resolution model can be a lot more extreme than a low resolution model might indicate”. I suggest to add “ …that locally the hydrological response…” to avoid confusion. The catchment anomalies, especially for runoff, surprisingly are well captured by the low resolution model (figure 9), while at local scale you do observe higher anomalies than what represented at coarse resolution.

- P1L1: In conventional distributed hydrological modeling many more approaches (scales of applications) can be distinguished: plot, basin, regional, continental, global scale etc. Maybe you mean distributed hydrological modeling connected with climate models?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (04 Mar 2019) by Nadav Peleg

AR by Joost Buitink on behalf of the Authors (06 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (06 Mar 2019) by Nadav Peleg

AR by Joost Buitink on behalf of the Authors (07 Mar 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

This study describes how the spatial resolution of hydrological models affects the model results. The high-resolution model allowed for more spatial variability than the low-resolution model. As a result, the low-resolution model failed to capture most variability that was simulated with the high-resolution model. This has implications for the interpretation of results carried out at coarse resolutions, as they may fail to represent the local small-scale variability.