Development of a New Integrated Framework for Improved Rainfall-Runoff Modeling under Climate Variability and Human Activities

Arash Malekian (), Bahram Choubin, Junguo Liu () and Farzaneh Sajedi-Hosseini
Additional contact information
Arash Malekian: University of Tehran
Bahram Choubin: University of Tehran
Junguo Liu: Southern University of Science and Technology
Farzaneh Sajedi-Hosseini: University of Tehran

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2019, vol. 33, issue 7, No 16, 2515 pages

Abstract: Abstract The relationship between rainfall and runoff is a complex phenomenon and understanding the physical processes, hydrological components and their impacts on response of watershed to precipitation is one of the challenging issues in watershed hydrology and planning. There is still a need to improve conceptual hydrological models in water scarce regions, such as Iran mainly because in many cases there is not enough data to fully describe this phenomenon. In this research, we aimed to present an improved and parsimonious framework that increases the performance of a conceptual model in water balance and discharge modeling for Delichay watershed located in Hablehroud basin, Iran as one of the main source of water supply for downstream fertile agricultural areas that produce a considerable amount of cereals and play a major role for food and water security of the region. In areas where data for water cycle components are not available or limited, it is recommended to use parsimonious approach in order to have an acceptable level of understanding of the system with minimum possible predictor variables. The Salas model used in current research to model water balance over the period 1983–2012 and evaluation of the results indicated an unsatisfactory performance when the entire period was modeled altogether (NSE = 0.35, d = 0.70, R2 = 0.63, RSR = 0.80, PBIAS = 4.96 and RMSE = 41.87). A key reason is that this watershed is intensively impacted by human activities and homogeneity analysis confirmed a sudden shift in runoff data during 1998–1999. Such a sudden shift reveals the role of human activities impacts on the watershed with a total reduction of 58 mm of runoff per year while the climate variability has not occurred in the region. Thus, the entire period (i.e. 1983–2012) was divided into two homogenous sub-periods of before and after the change point (i.e., pre-change and post-change periods). The results indicated that modeling performance in the sub-periods improved (e.g. the NSE was 0.77 and 0.66 for pre-change and post-change, respectively, vs. 0.35 for entire period). Meanwhile, it is revealed that water balance affected by human activities over the time and application of historical data for water balance modeling cannot be reliable without considering the homogeneous data. Since, many watersheds in the world have been affected by human activities or climate variability, it is recommended to consider the homogeneity of observed data before any application.

Keywords: Hydrological balance; Human activities; Salas model; Homogeneity analysis; Sudden shift (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-019-02281-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:33:y:2019:i:7:d:10.1007_s11269-019-02281-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-019-02281-0

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().