Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Hallouin, Thibault; Bruen, Michael; O'Loughlin, Fiachra E.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1031-2020

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1031-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1031-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

Research article

|

04 Mar 2020

Research article |

| 04 Mar 2020

Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Thibault Hallouin, Michael Bruen, and Fiachra E. O'Loughlin

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-24-1031-2020-supplement

Data sets

Met Éireann Daily Meteorological Data https://www.met.ie/climate/available-data/daily-data

Model code and software

SMARTpy: Conceptual Rainfall-Runoff Model (Version 0.2.0) T. Hallouin, E. Mockler, and M. Bruen https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2564042

EFlowCalc: Ecological Streamflow Characteristics Calculator (Version 0.0.2) T. Hallouin https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2566762

HydroEval: Evaluator for Streamflow Simulations (Version 0.0.2) T. Hallouin https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2591218

Short summary

A hydrological model was used to compare different parameterisation strategies in view of predicting ecologically relevant streamflow indices in 33 Irish catchments. Compared for 14 different periods, a strategy fitting simulated and observed streamflow indices yielded better performance than fitting simulated and observed streamflow, but it also yielded a less consistent ensemble of parameter sets, suggesting that these indices may not be hydrologically relevant for model parameterisation.