Articles | Volume 29, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-627-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-627-2025
Research article
 | 
04 Feb 2025
Research article |  | 04 Feb 2025

Achieving water budget closure through physical hydrological process modelling: insights from a large-sample study

Xudong Zheng, Dengfeng Liu, Shengzhi Huang, Hao Wang, and Xianmeng Meng

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This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Geoscientific Model Development (GMD).
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Cited articles

Abhishek, Kinouchi, T., Abolafia-Rosenzweig, R., and Ito, M.: Water Budget Closure in the Upper Chao Phraya River Basin, Thailand Using Multisource Data, Remote Sensing, 14, 173, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14010173, 2022. 
Abolafia-Rosenzweig, R., Pan, M., Zeng, J., and Livneh, B.: Remotely sensed ensembles of the terrestrial water budget over major global river basins: An assessment of three closure techniques, Remote Sens. Environ., 252, 112191, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.112191, 2020. 
Addor, N., Newman, A. J., Mizukami, N., and Clark, M. P.: The CAMELS data set: catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 5293–5313, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-5293-2017, 2017 (data available at: https://ncar.github.io/hydrology/datasets/CAMELS_attributes, last access: 23 October 2022). 
Aerts, J. P. M., Hut, R. W., van de Giesen, N. C., Drost, N., van Verseveld, W. J., Weerts, A. H., and Hazenberg, P.: Large-sample assessment of varying spatial resolution on the streamflow estimates of the wflow_sbm hydrological model, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 26, 4407–4430, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-26-4407-2022, 2022. 
Ansari, R., Liaqat, M. U., and Grossi, G.: Evaluation of gridded datasets for terrestrial water budget assessment in the Upper Jhelum River Basin-South Asia, J. Hydrol., 613, 128294, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.128294, 2022. 
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Short summary
Water budget non-closure is a widespread phenomenon among multisource datasets which undermines the robustness of hydrological inferences. This study proposes a Multisource Dataset Correction Framework grounded in Physical Hydrological Process Modelling to enhance water budget closure, termed PHPM-MDCF. We examined the efficiency and robustness of the framework using the CAMELS dataset and achieved an average reduction of 49 % in total water budget residuals across 475 CONUS basins.
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