Applicability of TOPMODEL in the mountainous catchments in the upper Nysa K\u0142odzka river basin (SW Poland)

Justyna Jeziorska,Tomasz Niedzielski

doi:10.1007/s11600-018-0121-6

Justyna Jeziorska, Tomasz Niedzielski

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-018-0121-6

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Abstract

River basins located in the Central Sudetes (SW Poland) demonstrate a high vulnerability to flooding. Four mountainous basins and the corresponding outlets have been chosen for modeling the streamflow dynamics using TOPMODEL, a physically based semi-distributed topohydrological model. The model has been calibrated using the Monte Carlo approach—with discharge, rainfall, and evapotranspiration data used to estimate the parameters. The overall performance of the model was judged by interpreting the efficiency measures. TOPMODEL was able to reproduce the main pattern of the hydrograph with acceptable accuracy for two of the investigated catchments. However, it failed to simulate the hydrological response in the remaining two catchments. The best performing data set obtained Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.78. This data set was chosen to conduct a detailed analysis aiming to estimate the optimal timespan of input data for which TOPMODEL performs best. The best fit was attained for the half-year time span. The model was validated and found to reveal good skills.

Highlights

Better understanding of watershed dynamics is one of the key factors in solving water-related scientific and practical problems. This role becomes crucial for effective planning and management of water resources (Beven and Freer 2001a; Bastola et al 2008) in areas endangered by extreme hydrological events
The Monte Carlo procedure, that has been proven to be useful for hydrological studies (Romanowicz and Beven 2003), was carried out to estimate a set of parameters that offer the best model performance
The procedure was carried out for all above-mentioned catchments, in each case study for the period of 1 hydrological year, and the data from HY 2010, HY 2011, and HY 2012 were taken as an input

Summary

Introduction

Better understanding of watershed dynamics is one of the key factors in solving water-related scientific and practical problems This role becomes crucial for effective planning and management of water resources (Beven and Freer 2001a; Bastola et al 2008) in areas endangered by extreme hydrological events. The availability of spatial characteristics of the catchment that rose with the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) shifted the research interests from the traditional lumped models towards more complicated, distributed ones. Simplified model structure diminishes the data requirements This conceptual model integrates the ability to simulate the spatial distribution of its results at any time step (Choi and Beven 2007) with the computational efficiency that allows multiple simulations (Peters et al 2003).

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