Impact of Calibration Objective on Hydrological Model Performance in Ungauged Watersheds

Abstract

Predictions in ungauged basins (PUBs) are an increasingly important question in the water resource and quality management fields, especially for small watersheds where the phenomenon of data scarcity is prevalent. The transfer of hydrological parameters on the basis of regionalization is a common approach for solving PUB problems, and plenty of research has been undertaken on how to transfer calibrated parameters from gauged to ungauged watersheds. However, hydrological parameters estimation is substantially influenced by calibration objectives, which may affect model performance on the recipient watershed as well. In this paper the influence of calibration objectives on the transfer of parameter sets from one watershed to another is discussed. The HSPF hydrological model and the PEST automatic calibration model with four calibration objectives (squared error of daily flow, squared error of monthly flow, squared error of exceedance flow time, and sum of these squared errors) were applied. One gauged watershed of the Lake Dianchi Basin with daily flow data from 1999 to 2010 was calibrated by the combined HSPF-PEST model to obtain the transferrable parameters. Then the entire parameter sets were transferred to another neighborhood watershed, and model performance was tested by conventional goodness-of-fit statistics. Results show that (1) parameters transferred from all four calibration objectives perform well on the target watershed; (2) selection of calibration objective has a significant impact on model performance for both donor and recipient watersheds; and (3) the differences among objectives are similar in the two watersheds, suggesting that the objectives’ features are transferrable. Therefore, the selection of calibration objective should be considered as a significant factor when transferring parameters to ungauged watersheds.