Impact of correcting sub-daily climate  model biases for hydrological studies

Faghih, Mina; Brissette, François; Sabeti, Parham

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1545-2022

Articles | Volume 26, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1545-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-1545-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 26, issue 6

Research article

|

23 Mar 2022

Research article |

| 23 Mar 2022

Impact of correcting sub-daily climate model biases for hydrological studies

Mina Faghih, François Brissette, and Parham Sabeti

Data sets

ERA5 reanalysis is in production H. Hersbach and D. Dee https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysisera5- single-levels?tab=form

Model code and software

GR4J Rainfall Runoff Model (Deterministic and Stochastic Methods) with Matlab T. Benkaci https://github.com/TBenkHyd2/Hydrological_Models

Shuffled Complex Evolution (SCE-UA) Method Q. Duan https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/7671-shuffled-complex-evolution-sce-ua-method

Short summary

The diurnal cycles of precipitation and temperature generated by climate models are biased. This work investigates whether or not impact modellers should correct the diurnal cycle biases prior to conducting hydrological impact studies at the sub-daily scale. The results show that more accurate streamflows are obtained when the diurnal cycles biases are corrected. This is noticeable for smaller catchments, which have a quicker reaction time to changes in precipitation and temperature.