Regionalization of catchment hydrological model parameters for global water resources simulations

Abstract

Parameter regionalization of hydrological models is one of the most commonly used methods for hydrological prediction over ungauged catchments. Although there were many regional studies, there is no clear conclusion on the best-performing regionalization method for global hydrological modelling. The objective of this study is to determine an appropriate global-scale regionalization scheme (GSRS) for global hydrological modelling. To this end, the performance of five regionalization methods with two different average options, two weighting approaches, and seven efficiency thresholds (i.e. Kling-Gupta efficiency (KGE) values to measure hydrological model performances) was compared over thousands of catchments based on four conceptual hydrological models. Results of nine global models from the Global Earth Observation for Integrated Water Resource Assessment (EartH2Observe) project were selected to validate the accuracy of GSRS in estimating global runoff. The results show that: (1) Spatial proximity method with the Inverse Distance Weighting method and the output average option offers the best regionalization result when using the KGE ≥ 0.5 as an efficiency threshold for all four hydrological models, (2) the regionalization-based global hydrological simulation schemes (RGHSs), i.e. the proposed GSRS combining with four hydrological models, consistently performs better than the nine global models from EartH2Observe project in the estimation of runoff for most catchments, with varying degrees of improvement in the median, upper and lower quartiles, and whiskers of each performance metric, and (3) the global long-term annual water resources estimated by RGHSs range between 42,592 and 46,810 km3/yr.