Abstract
The Upper Paraná River Basin (UPRB) has undergone many rapid land use changes in recent decades, due to accelerating population growth. Thus, the prediction of water resources has crucial importance in improving planning and sustainable management. This paper presents a large-scale hydrological modelling of the UPRB, using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. The model was calibrated and validated for 78 outlets, over a 32-year simulation period between 1984 and 2015. The results and the comparison between observed and simulated values showed that after the calibration process, most of the outlets performed to a satisfactory level or better in all objective functions analyzed with 86%, 92%, 76%, 88%, and 74% for Percent bias, Coefficient of determination, Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, Kling-Gupta efficiency, and the Ratio of Standard deviation of observations to root mean square error, respectively. The model output provided in this work could be used in further simulations, such as the evaluation of the impacts of land use change or climate change on river flows of the Upper Paraná Basin.
Highlights
Hydrological models have been used worldwide as a powerful tool for water resources research and management
As stated in the modelling protocol, the criterion for selecting outlets for calibration was that they had an unsatisfactory rating in at least one of the objective functions presented in Table 2 over the simulation period (1984–2015)
The Upper Paraná River Basin was built with the highest possible spatial discretization using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model for a long-term period between 1979 and 2015
Summary
Hydrological models have been used worldwide as a powerful tool for water resources research and management. Hydrological modelling has contributed to improving the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, especially through research activities dedicated to mitigating climate change [1,2], land use changes [3,4], and sources of water pollution [5]. Most such studies are dedicated to small- to medium-sized basins, which produce some difficulty in generalizing the conclusions to large-scale basins. Only a few studies have been performed for large-scale basins [6]
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