Articles | Volume 25, issue 9
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5013-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-25-5013-2021
Technical note
 | 
17 Sep 2021
Technical note |  | 17 Sep 2021

Technical note: RAT – a robustness assessment test for calibrated and uncalibrated hydrological models

Pierre Nicolle, Vazken Andréassian, Paul Royer-Gaspard, Charles Perrin, Guillaume Thirel, Laurent Coron, and Léonard Santos

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Cited articles

Andréassian, V., Perrin, C., Berthet, L., Le Moine, N., Lerat, J., Loumagne, C., Oudin, L., Mathevet, T., Ramos, M.-H., and Valéry, A.: HESS Opinions ”Crash tests for a standardized evaluation of hydrological models”, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 13, 1757–1764, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-13-1757-2009, 2009. 
Andréassian, V., Le Moine, N., Perrin, C., Ramos, M.-H., Oudin, L., Mathevet, T., Lerat, J., and Berthet, L.: All that glitters is not gold: the case of calibrating hydrological models, Hydrol Process., 26, 2206–2210, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.9264, 2012. 
Bellprat, O., Kotlarski, S., Lüthi, D., and Schär, C.: Physical constraints for temperature biases in climate models: limits of temperature biases, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, 4042–4047, https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50737, 2013. 
Beven, K.: Facets of uncertainty: epistemic uncertainty, non-stationarity, likelihood, hypothesis testing, and communication, Hydrol. Sci. J., 61, 1652–1665, https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2015.1031761, 2016. 
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In this note, a new method (RAT) is proposed to assess the robustness of hydrological models. The RAT method is particularly interesting because it does not require multiple calibrations (it is therefore applicable to uncalibrated models), and it can be used to determine whether a hydrological model may be safely used for climate change impact studies. Success at the robustness assessment test is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of model robustness.