Application of a land surface model for simulating rainfall streamflow hydrograph: 1. Model calibration

Different variants of parameters’ calibration of land surface model SWAP were examined with the aim to maximize the accuracy of reproducing rainfall runoff hydrograph. The optimization of parameter values was automated based on two different algorithms for the search of the global optimum of an objective function: a random search technique and a shuffled complex evolution method SCE-UA. In both cases, two objective functions, based on the mean systematic error and the Nash and Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency, were used. The number of calibrated parameters varied from 10 to 15, and their values were within the reasonable range so as not to contradict the physical meaning and to ensure the best agreement between the simulated and observed daily river runoff. The streamflow hydrographs for some rivers in USA simulated with the use of different sets of optimized parameters were compared with observation data.