Abstract
Abstract. We present a community data set of daily forcing and hydrologic response data for 671 small- to medium-sized basins across the contiguous United States (median basin size of 336 km2) that spans a very wide range of hydroclimatic conditions. Area-averaged forcing data for the period 1980–2010 was generated for three basin spatial configurations – basin mean, hydrologic response units (HRUs) and elevation bands – by mapping daily, gridded meteorological data sets to the subbasin (Daymet) and basin polygons (Daymet, Maurer and NLDAS). Daily streamflow data was compiled from the United States Geological Survey National Water Information System. The focus of this paper is to (1) present the data set for community use and (2) provide a model performance benchmark using the coupled Snow-17 snow model and the Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting Model, calibrated using the shuffled complex evolution global optimization routine. After optimization minimizing daily root mean squared error, 90% of the basins have Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency scores ≥0.55 for the calibration period and 34% ≥ 0.8. This benchmark provides a reference level of hydrologic model performance for a commonly used model and calibration system, and highlights some regional variations in model performance. For example, basins with a more pronounced seasonal cycle generally have a negative low flow bias, while basins with a smaller seasonal cycle have a positive low flow bias. Finally, we find that data points with extreme error (defined as individual days with a high fraction of total error) are more common in arid basins with limited snow and, for a given aridity, fewer extreme error days are present as the basin snow water equivalent increases.
Highlights
We provide some basic analysis relating to questions such as (1) what is the model performance across a large sample of basins and how does model performance vary across basin hydroclimatic conditions? (2) How do error characteristics relate to basin calibration performance and hydroclimatic conditions? This basic analysis is intended to highlight some of the important questions that can be answered through large-sample hydrologic studies and provide example results for further exploration
A further subsetting of the reference gages were made as a follow-on to the Hydro-Climatic Data Network (HCDN) 1988 data set (Slack and Landwehr, 1992)
This type of data set can be used for many applications including evaluation of new modeling systems against a well known benchmark system over wide ranging conditions, or as a base for comprehensive predictability experiments exploring the importance of meteorology or initial basin conditions
Summary
With the increasing availability of gridded meteorological data sets, streamflow records and computing resources, largesample hydrology studies have become more common in the last decade or more (i.e., Nathan and McMahon, 1990; Perrin et al, 2001; Maurer et al, 2002; Beldring et al, 2003; Merz and Bloschl, 2004; Andreassian et al, 2004; Lohmann et al, 2004; Duan et al, 2006; Oudin et al, 2006, 2010; Samaniego et al, 2010; Martinez and Gupta, 2010, 2011; Nester et al, 2011, 2012; Livneh and Lettenmaier, 2012, 2013; Kumar et al, 2013; Oubeidillah et al, 2013). Within the United States there have been several studies to produce large-sample hydrometeorological data sets (Maurer et al, 2002; Lohmann et al, 2004; Duan et al, 2006; Thornton et al, 2012; Xia et al, 2012; Livneh et al, 2013) Many of these data sets provide gridded data and may need to be further processed by the end user for their specific hydrologic model configuration. The development of the basin data set presented takes advantage of high-quality, freely available data from various US government agencies and research laboratories It includes (1) daily forcing data for 671 basins for multiple spatial configurations over the 1980–2010 time period; (2) daily streamflow data; (3) basic metadata (e.g., location, elevation, size, and basin delineation shapefiles) and (4) benchmark model performance which contains the final calibrated model parameter sets, model output time series for all basins as well as summary graphics for each basin.
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