Impact of Calibration Objective on Hydrological Model Performance in Ungauged Watersheds

Abstract

AbstractPredictions in ungauged basins (PUBs) are an increasingly important question in the water resource and quality management fields, especially for small watersheds where the phenomenon of data scarcity is prevalent. The transfer of hydrological parameters on the basis of regionalization is a common approach for solving PUB problems, and plenty of research has been undertaken on how to transfer calibrated parameters from gauged to ungauged watersheds. However, hydrological parameters estimation is substantially influenced by calibration objectives, which may affect model performance on the recipient watershed as well. In this paper the influence of calibration objectives on the transfer of parameter sets from one watershed to another is discussed. The HSPF hydrological model and the PEST automatic calibration model with four calibration objectives (squared error of daily flow, squared error of monthly flow, squared error of exceedance flow time, and sum of these squared errors) were applied. One gaug...