• 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.