Abstract
In Chile in recent years, changes in precipitation and temperatures have been reported that could affect water resource management and planning. One way of facing these changes is studying and understanding the behavior of hydrological processes at a regional scale and their different temporal scales. Therefore, the objective of this study is to analyze the importance of the hydrological processes of the HBV model at different temporal scales and for different hydrological regimes. To this end, 88 watersheds located in south-central Chile were analyzed using time-varying sensitivity analysis at five different temporal scales (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years). The results show that the model detects the temporality of the most important hydrological processes. In watersheds with a pluvial regime, the greater the temporal scale, the greater the importance of soil water accumulation processes and the lower the importance of surface runoff processes. By contrast, in watersheds with a nival regime, at greater temporal scales, groundwater accumulation and release processes take on greater importance, and soil water release processes are less important.
Highlights
Due to climate change, climate variability, and changes in land use and cover, the frequency and magnitude of extreme events such as floods have continually increased in recent decades, generating environmental, economic, and social losses worldwide [1,2]
The time-varying sensitivity analysis (TVSA) method based on Regional Sensitivity Analysis (RSA) was implemented using simulations of 88 previously selected watersheds, and 5 analyses were performed at different time scales (1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years)
To calculate the MVD index, it is necessary that B (KGE ≥ 0.6) and NB (KGE < 0.6) results be obtained for the watershed model and time window
Summary
Climate variability, and changes in land use and cover, the frequency and magnitude of extreme events such as floods have continually increased in recent decades, generating environmental, economic, and social losses worldwide [1,2]. An important part of this development is the study of the dominant processes in a watershed and their temporality as, depending on the process, they could take on importance at different temporal scales—from minutes, hours (e.g., floods), weeks, and months to years (e.g., droughts)—and vary in wet and dry periods [6–8]. Diop et al [9] investigated the long-term streamflow trends at three time scales (monthly, seasonal, and annual) in the upper Senegal River basin, Howden et al [10] presented a method to detect changes in the mean and variance of hydrological variables and explore the hydrological processes involved in the non-seasonal behavior of time series, and Basijokaite and Kelleher [11] analyzed the relationship between the most important processes in a watershed and their seasonal and annual behavior. Various studies have demonstrated that changes in streamflow time series can be attributed to climate [12–15]
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