Exploring the potential for parameter transfer from daily to hourly time step in the HYPE model for Sweden

Abstract

ABSTRACT Catchments with response time shorter than a day require simulations at sub-daily resolution for flood forecasting. Long-term hydrological data with sub-daily time resolution is lacking for many catchments and, thus, it is worthwhile to investigate the potential in using hydrological model parameters calibrated at a daily temporal resolution to simulate sub-daily runoff. This study investigates the potential of directly transferring the parameters from the one-day Hydrological Predictions for the Environment (HYPE) model for Sweden to a one-hour time step version. A sensitivity analysis and calibration of the one-hour model were also performed to explore the possibility of achieving improved model performance through an additive and multiplicative scaling of the parameters. Directly transferring the parameters led to a negligible loss in performance for all 147 catchments evaluated here. Scaling of the parameters did not lead to improvement for slow-responding catchments, while the increase in performance was negligible for catchments with sub-daily response time.