Effect of Baseflow Separation on Uncertainty of Hydrological Modeling in the Xinanjiang Model

Abstract

Based on the idea of inputting more available useful information for evaluation to gain less uncertainty, this study focuses on how well the uncertainty can be reduced by considering the baseflow estimation information obtained from the smoothed minima method (SMM). The Xinanjiang model and the generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) method with the shuffled complex evolution Metropolis (SCEM-UA) sampling algorithm were used for hydrological modeling and uncertainty analysis, respectively. The Jiangkou basin, located in the upper of the Hanjiang River, was selected as case study. It was found that the number and standard deviation of behavioral parameter sets both decreased when the threshold value for the baseflow efficiency index increased, and the high Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficients correspond well with the high baseflow efficiency coefficients. The results also showed that uncertainty interval width decreased significantly, while containing ratio did not decrease by much and the simulated runoff with the behavioral parameter sets can fit better to the observed runoff, when threshold for the baseflow efficiency index was taken into consideration. These implied that using the baseflow estimation information can reduce the uncertainty in hydrological modeling to some degree and gain more reasonable prediction bounds.