Does a successful comprehensive evaluation increase confidence in a hydrological model intended for climate impact asses
- PDF / 1,371,397 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 207 Views
Does a successful comprehensive evaluation increase confidence in a hydrological model intended for climate impact assessment? Alexander Gelfan, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 2 January 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
The objective of the study is to verify a hypothesis that a hydrological model, which successfully passed a comprehensive evaluation test (CE-test), is more suitable for climate impact study than that which failed the test. In our study, the CE-test is a specially designed model evaluation procedure, including a set of enhanced tests of model performance and robustness. The hypothesis verification is carried out with two models, ECOMAG and SWAP, which are applied for the Lena and Mackenzie River basins. The following three versions of every model are compared: (1) version A with a priori assigned parameters (without any calibration); (2) version B calibrated against streamflow observations at the basin outlets only, and (3) version C calibrated against streamflow observations at several gauges within the basins. We found that the B and C versions were successful in passing the CE-test, while the A versions failed the test. The C versions performed better than the B versions, especially at the monthly time scale. Then, all model versions were forced by global climate model (GCM) ensemble data to simulate flow projections for the twenty-first century and assess the projection uncertainty. Summarizing the results, we found that the differences in projections (in terms of mean annual changes in discharge and their uncertainties) between A version and two other versions were nearly three times larger than the differences between the B and C versions. Thus, the CE-test results together with the estimated differences in projections give us reason to conclude that the successful comprehensive evaluation of a model increases its confidence and suitability for impact assessment. Keywords Hydrological model . Land surface model . Comprehensive evaluation . Robustness . Climate impact assessment
This article is part of a Special Issue on “How evaluation of hydrological models influences results of climate impact assessment,” edited by Valentina Krysanova, Fred Hattermann, and Zbigniew Kundzewicz
Climatic Change
1 Introduction There is a large mismatch between achievements in improving hydrological models, particularly the ones aimed at climate change impact studies, deepening their physical content, extending their ability to utilize climate model data, etc., on the one hand, and outdated methods of the hydrological model evaluation, on the other hand (see e.g., Krysanova et al., 2018). In the vast majority of impact studies, hydrologists prefer easy-to-pass tests (such as the split-sample test proposed by Klemeš (1986) for a stable climate) to evaluate the model performance. As a result, there are many successfully tested models that pretend to be suitable for impact studies. In order not to get lost in the “jungle of models” (Kundzew
Data Loading...
