Hydrological Simulation of a Large Catchment Using the Variable Infiltration Capacity Model

Abstract

Understanding the hydrological response of the larger catchment/river basin is a challenge under the changing environment/climate change. In the present study, the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model, a macroscale hydrological model, is applied over the Tekra catchment (with area of 108780 km2), a part of Godavari river basin in India. The characteristic of the VIC model are: consideration of variability of soil moisture storage within the grid, nonlinear representation of baseflow and explicit representation of vegetation class. All these characteristics strengthen its suitability to simulate the hydrological changes. In this paper, the performance assessment of the VIC model to simulate the hydrology of the considered large catchment is done. Result shows reasonable agreement between the observed and simulated daily stream flows for the monsoon season of 2009. The gridwise computation of the VIC model allows the meteorological data directly from gridded dataset or General Circulation Models (GCMs) for climate change assessment.