A Review of Tank Model and Its Applicability to Various Korean Catchment Conditions

Abstract

This paper reviews a conceptual rainfall-runoff model called Tank which has been widely used over the last 20 years in Korea as a part of a water resource modelling framework for assessing and developing long-term water resource polices. In order to examine the uncertainty of model predictions and the sensitivity of model’s parameters, Monte Carlos and Markov chain-based approaches are applied to five catchments of various Korean geographical and climatic conditions where the catchment sizes are ranged from 83 to 4786 km2. In addition, three optimization algorithms—dynamically dimensioned search (DDS), robust parameter estimation (ROPE), and shuffled complex evolution (SCE)—are selected to test whether the model parameters can be optimized consistently within a narrower range than the uncertainty bounds. From the uncertainty analysis, it is found that there is limited success in refining the priori distributions of the model parameters, indicating there is a high degree of equifinality for some parameters or at least there are large numbers of parameter combinations leading to good solutions within model’s uncertainty bounds. Out of the three optimization algorithms, SCE meets the criteria of the consistency best. It is also found that there are still some parameters that even the SCE method struggles to refine the priori distributions. It means that their contribution to model results is minimal and can take a value within a reasonable range. It suggests that the model may be reconceptualized to be parsimonious and to rationalize some parameters without affecting model’s capacity to replicate historical flow characteristics. Cross-validation indicates that sensitive parameters to catchment characteristics can be transferred when geophysical similarity exists between two catchments. Regionalization can be further improved by using a regression or geophysical similarity-based approach to transfer model parameters to ungauged catchments. It may be beneficial to categorize the model parameters depending on the level of their sensitivities, and a different approach to each category may be applied to regionalize the calibrated parameters.