Regional Parameter Estimation of the VIC Land Surface Model: Methodology and Application to River Basins in China

TLDR

The study develops a regional parameter estimation approach for the VIC‑3L land surface model to enhance streamflow simulation across Chinese river basins. The method calibrates seven runoff‑related parameters in fourteen basins from diverse climatic zones, then regionalizes these parameters to uncalibrated basins based on climate and basin domain, and validates the approach on nineteen independent basins and a continental‑scale simulation. Regionalized parameters reduced model bias by 0.4–249.8 %, RMSE by 0.2–119.1 %, and increased NSE by 1.9–31.7 % for most basins, and continental simulations matched observations, confirming the method’s promise for ungauged basins.

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a methodology for regional parameter estimation of the three-layer Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC-3L) land surface model with the goal of improving the streamflow simulation for river basins in China. This methodology is designed to obtain model parameter estimates from a limited number of calibrated basins and then regionalize them to uncalibrated basins based on climate characteristics and large river basin domains, and ultimately to continental China. Fourteen basins from different climatic zones and large river basins were chosen for model calibration. For each of these basins, seven runoff-related model parameters were calibrated using a systematic manual calibration approach. These calibrated parameters were then transferred within the climate and large river basin zones or climatic zones to the uncalibrated basins. To test the efficiency of the parameter regionalization method, a verification study was conducted on 19 independent river basins in China. Overall, the regionalized parameters, when evaluated against the a priori parameter estimates, were able to reduce the model bias by 0.4%–249.8% and relative root-mean-squared error by 0.2%–119.1% and increase the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency of the streamflow simulation by 1.9%–31.7% for most of the tested basins. The transferred parameters were then used to perform a hydrological simulation over all of China so as to test the applicability of the regionalized parameters on a continental scale. The continental simulation results agree well with the observations at regional scales, indicating that the tested regionalization method is a promising scheme for parameter estimation for ungauged basins in China.