Rainfall-Runoff Modelling Across Southeast Australia: Datasets, Models and Results

Abstract

This study describes a daily rainfall, potential evaporation and streamflow data set compiled for the important water resources region of southeast Australia, and the application of six commonly used lumped conceptual rainfall-runoff models to estimate daily runoff across the region. The daily climate data set and the daily modelled runoff are available from 1895 to 2008 at 0.05° grid resolution across the region. The modelling exercise indicates that the rainfall-runoff models can generally be calibrated to reproduce the daily observed streamflow (for 232 catchments in the high runoff generation areas), and the regionalisation results indicate that the use of optimised parameter values from a gauged catchment nearby can model runoff reasonably well in the ungauged areas. There are differences between the six models, but they are relatively small when used to describe aggregated results across large regions.