Assessment of the Water Resource of the Yodo River Basin in Japan Using a Distributed Hydrological Model Coupled with WRF Model

Abstract

The Yodo River basin provides water resource to the highly populated areas of Kinki, Japan. Similar to other river basins located elsewhere, the Yodo River basin is also vulnerable to negative impacts of climate change. Since accurate prediction of extreme events is essential for assessing the impact of climate change, any integrated monitoring and prediction system should be based on the hydrometeorological system. For this goal, dynamic downscaling of the meteorological data by using coupled mesoscale hydrometeorological modeling approach to simulate the local and regional effects on water resources of the basin, has been attempted. Coupled model consisting of WRF mesoscale meteorological model and distributed hydrological model, along with a simplified dam model, at high-resolution was used to simulate the response of the Yodo River basin to atmospheric forcings in one-way coupling mode. The distributed hydrological model is shown to be capable of simulating the basin hydrology of the Yodo River basin by replacing the atmospheric forcings from observation station data with the high-resolution gridded hydrometeorological variables from WRF mesoscale meteorological model.