A toolkit for the development and application of parsimonious hydrological models.

Abstract

A modelling toolkit is described which has been developed to produce parsimonious model structures with a high degree of parameter identifiability. This is necessary if sensible relationships between model parameters and catchment characteristics are to be established, for example for regionalization studies. The toolkit contains two major components. The first is a rainfall-runoff modeling system with a generic architecture of lumped, conceptual or metric-conceptual model elements, which allows alternative model structures to be rapidly constructed and tested. The second component is a Monte-Carlo analysis toolbox combining a number of analysis tools to investigate parameter identifiability, model behaviour and prediction uncertainty. Two example applications are presented. These illustrate the use of multiple objective functions to extract information from a single output time-series for analysis of parameter sensitivity and identifiability, and the trade-off between model complexity and identifiability.