A new Xin'anjiang and Sacramento combined rainfall-runoff model and its application

Abstract

Abstract The Xin'anjiang model and the Sacramento model are two widely used short-term watershed rainfall-runoff forecasting models, each with their own unique model structure, strengths, weaknesses and applicability. This paper introduces a weight factor to integrate the two models into a combined model, and uses the cyclic coordinate method to calibrate the weight factor and the parameters of the two models to explore the possibility of the complementarity between the two models. With application to the Yuxiakou watershed in Qingjiang River, it is verified that the cyclic coordinate method, although simple, can converge rapidly to a satisfactory calibration accuracy, mostly after two iterations. Also, the results in case studies show that the forecast accuracy of the new combined rainfall-runoff model can improve the forecast precision by 4.3% in a testing period, better in runoff process fitting than the Xin'anjiang model that performs better than the Sacramento model.