Application of meteorological element combination-driven SWAT model based on meteorological datasets in alpine basin

Abstract

Abstract Thus far, reanalysis-based meteorological products have drawn little attention to the influence of meteorological elements of products on hydrological modeling. This study aims to evaluate the hydrological application potential of the precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation of the China Meteorological Assimilation Driving Datasets for the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model (CMADS) and Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) in an alpine basin. The precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation of the gauge-observed meteorological dataset (GD), CFSR, and CMADS were cross-combined, and 20 scenarios were constructed to drive the SWAT model. From the comprehensive comparisons of all scenarios, we drew the following conclusions: (1) among the three meteorological elements, precipitation has the greatest impact on the simulation results, and using GD precipitation from sparse stations yielded better performance than CMADS and CFSR; (2) although the SWAT modeling driven by CMADS and CFSR performed poorly, with CMADS underestimation and CFSR overestimation, the temperature and solar radiation of CMADS and CFSR can be an alternative data source for streamflow simulation; (3) models using GD precipitation, CFSR temperature, and CFSR solar radiation as input yielded the best performance in streamflow simulation, suggesting that these data sources can be applied to this data-scarce alpine region.