Abstract
Abstract. The Yalong River is the third largest base of the 13 hydropower bases in China. Long-time series of river discharge records are essential for the design of hydropower stations and water resource management. The existing monitoring network is scarce and cannot provide sufficient hydrological information for the basin. Rainfall–runoff models are popular tools for extending hydrological data in both space and time. In this paper, the feasibility of applying a conceptual rainfall–runoff model, HYdrological MODel (HYMOD), to the upper Yalong River basin was evaluated. The generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) was employed for model calibration and uncertainty analysis. The results show that simulated discharge matches the observations satisfactorily, indicating the hydrological model performs well and the application of HYMOD to estimate long time-series of river discharge in the study area is feasible.
Highlights
Located in western Sichuan Province and southeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Yalong River is one of the biggest tributaries of the Jinsha River
The generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) method treats the combination of parameter values as a whole parameter set, the sensitivity of each model parameter can be inferred from the scatterplot (Fig. 2) of identified behavioural values of every parameter
It is concluded that HYdrological MODel (HYMOD) is applicable for runoff simulation in the upstream region of the Yalong River basin
Summary
Located in western Sichuan Province and southeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Yalong River is one of the biggest tributaries of the Jinsha River. River discharge monitoring stations within the upstream region of Yalong River basin are scarce (Zhang et al, 2000). Researchers have widely applied the distributed hydrological model in the study of the river basin hydrological cycle and obtained good results in simulations of hydrological features and runoff estimation (Wu et al, 2007; Zanon et al, 2013; Zhao et al, 2013). A daily step conceptual rainfall–runoff model, HYMOD, is applied in the upstream region of Yalong River basin for the purpose of evaluating its feasibility for estimating river discharge of long time series. The upper reaches of the Yalong River basin above the Ganzi in situ gauging station is selected as the study area This area has a drainage area of about 33 000 km with a river length of about 690 km. There is only one national hydrological station in the entire upstream of Yalong River basin located in Ganzi prefecture
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