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Hydrological models are often used for studying the hydrological effects of climate change; however, the stability of model performance and parameter values under changing climate conditions has seldom been evaluated and compared. In this study, three widely-used rainfall–runoff models, namely the SimHYD model, the HBV model and the Xin’anjiang model, are evaluated on two catchments subject to changing climate conditions. Evaluation is carried out with respect to the stability in their performance and parameter values in different calibration periods. The results show that (a) stability of model performance and parameter values depends on model structure as well as the climate of catchments, and the models with higher performance scores are more stable in changing conditions; (b) all the tested models perform better on a humid catchment than on an arid catchment; (c) parameter values are also more stable on a humid catchment than on an arid catchment; and (d) the differences in stability among models are somewhat larger in terms of model efficiency than in model parameter values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate and soil characteristics vary considerably around the Lake Victoria basin resulting in high spatial and temporal variability in catchment inflows. However, data for estimating the inflows are usually sparsely distributed and error-prone. Therefore, modelled estimates of the flows are highly uncertain, which could explain early difficulties in reproducing the lake water balance. The aim of this study was to improve the estimates of catchment flow to Lake Victoria. The WASMOD model was applied to the Nzoia River, one of the major tributaries to Lake Victoria. Uncertainty was assessed within the GLUE framework. During calibration, log-transformation was performed on both simulated and observed flows. The results showed that, despite its simple structure, WASMOD produces acceptable results for the basin. For a Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NS) threshold of 0.6, the percentage of observations bracketed by simulations (POBS) was 74%, the average relative interval length (ARIL) was 0.93, and the maximum NS value was 0.865. The residuals were shown to be homoscedastic, normally distributed and nearly independent. When the NS threshold was increased to 0.8, POBS decreased to 54% with an improvement of ARIL to 0.49, highlighting the effect of the subjective choice of likelihood threshold. Citation Kizza, M., Rodhe, A., Xu, C.-Y. & Ntale, H. K. (2011) Modelling catchment inflows into Lake Victoria: uncertainties in rainfall–runoff modelling for the Nzoia River. Hydrol. Sci. J. 56(7), 1210–1226. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Grid-based distributed models have become popular for describing spatial hydrological processes. However, the influence of non-homogeneity within a grid on streamflow simulation was not adequately addressed in the literature. In this study, we investigated how the statistical characteristics of soil moisture storage within a grid impacts on streamflow simulations. The spatial variation of the topographic index, TI, within a grid was used to determine parameter B of the statistical curve of soil moisture storage in the Xinanjiang model. For comparison of influences of the non-homogeneity within a grid on streamflow simulation, two parameterization schemes of soil moisture storage capacity were developed: a grid-parameterization scheme for a distributed model and a catchment-averaged scheme for a semi-distributed model. The practicability and usefulness of the grid-parameterization method were evaluated through model comparisons. The two models were applied in Jiangwan experimental catchment Zhejiang Province, China. Streamflow discharge data at the catchment outlet from 1971 to 1986 at different temporal resolutions, e.g. 15 min and daily time step, were used for model calibration and validation. Statistical results for different grid scales demonstrated that the mean and variation of TI and B decline significantly as the grid scale increases. The simulated streamflow discharges of the two models were similar and the semi-distributed model outperformed the distributed model slightly when the streamflow at the outlet of the catchment was used as the only basis for comparison. In addition, a relatively larger bias in the predicted discharges between these two models was observed along with an abrupt increase of soil moisture saturation ratio. A further analysis of the simulated soil moisture content distribution revealed that the distributed model can provide a reasonable representation of the variable source area concept, which was justified to some extent by the field experiment data. Editor D. Koutsoyiannis Citation Liu, J.T., Chen, X., Wu, J.C., Zhang, X.N., Feng, D.Z. and Xu, C.-Y., 2012. Grid parameterization of a conceptual, distributed hydrological model through integration of a sub-grid topographic index: necessity and practicability. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 57 (2), 282–297. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]