• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.15-23
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the degree of distribution influences the calibration of snow and runoff in distributed hydrological models using a multi-criteria calibration method. The Hydrology Laboratory-Research Distributed Hydrologic Model (HL-RDHM) developed by NOAA-National Weather Service (NWS) is employed to estimate optimized parameter sets. We have 3 scenarios depended on the model complexity for estimating best parameter sets: Lumped, Semi-Distributed, and Fully-Distributed. For the case study, the Durango River Basin, Colorado is selected as a study basin to consider both snow and water balance components. This study basin is in the mountainous western U.S. area and consists of 108 Hydrologic Rainfall Analysis Project (HRAP) grid cells. 5 and 13 parameters of snow and water balance models are calibrated with the Multi-Objective Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis (MOSCEM) algorithm. Model calibration and validation are conducted on 4km HRAP grids with 5 years (2001-2005) meteorological data and observations. Through case study, we show that snow and streamflow simulations are improved with multiple criteria calibrations without considering model complexity. In particular, we confirm that semi- and fully distributed models are better performances than those of lumped model. In case of lumped model, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values improve by 35% on snow average and 42% on runoff from a priori parameter set through multi-criteria calibrations. On the other hand, the RMSE values are improved by 40% and 43% for snow and runoff on semi- and fully-distributed models.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

In this study, the multi-objective optimization method is attemped to optimize the hydrological model to estimate the runoff through two hydrological processes. HL-RDHM, a distributed hydrological model that can simultaneously estimate the amount of snowfall and runoff, was used as the distributed hydrological model. The Durango River basin in Colorado, USA, was selected as the watershed. MOSCEM was used as a multi-objective optimization method and parameter calibration and hydrologic model optimization were tried by selecting 5 parameters related to snow melting and 13 parameters related to runoff. Data from 2004 to 2005 were used to optimize the model and verified using data from 2001 to 2004. By optimizing both the amount of snow and the amount of runoff, the RMSE error can be reduced from 7% to 40% of the simulation value based on the initial solution at three SNOTEL points based on the RMSE. The USGS observation point of the outflow is improved about 40%.