Remotely sensed evapotranspiration to calibrate a lumped conceptual model: Pitfalls and opportunities

Summary Physically representative hydrological models are essential for water resource management. New satellite evapotranspiration ( ET obs ) data might offer opportunities to improve model structure and parameter identifiability, if used as an independent calibration set. This study used a modelling experiment on 4 catchments in New South Wales, Australia, to investigate whether MODIS (16A3) ET obs can be used to improve parameter calibration for low parameter conceptual models. The catchment moisture deficit and exponential routing form of the model IHACRES was used to test calibration against streamflow, MODIS ET obs or a combination setoff the two. Results were compared against a regionalized parameter model and a model using MODIS ET obs directly as input. Firstly, the results indicated that the observed water balance of the catchments has, currently unexplained, large positive differences which impact the calibrated parameters. More generally, using MODIS ET obs as a calibration set, results in a reduction of the model performance as all residuals of the local water balance and timing differences between the water balance and the outflow need to be resolved by the routing component of the model. This is further complicated by variations in land cover affecting the MODIS ET obs . Finally this study confirms that the calibration of models using multiple environmental timeseries (such as MODIS ET obs and Q ) can be used to identify structural model issues.

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