Seasonal Streamflow Forecast in the Tocantins River Basin, Brazil: An Evaluation of ECMWF-SEAS5 with Multiple Conceptual Hydrological Models

Abstract

The assessment of seasonal streamflow forecasting is essential for appropriate water resource management. A suitable seasonal forecasting system requires the evaluation of both numerical weather prediction (NWP) and hydrological models to represent the atmospheric and hydrological processes and conditions in a specific region. In this paper, we evaluated the ECMWF-SEAS5 precipitation product with four hydrological models to represent seasonal streamflow forecasts performed at hydropower plants in the Legal Amazon region. The adopted models included GR4J, HYMOD, HBV, and SMAP, which were calibrated on a daily scale for the period from 2014 to 2019 and validated for the period from 2005 to 2013. The seasonal streamflow forecasts were obtained for the period from 2017 to 2019 by considering a daily scale streamflow simulation comprising an ensemble with 51 members of forecasts, starting on the first day of every month up to 7 months ahead. For each forecast, the corresponding monthly streamflow time series was estimated. A post-processing procedure based on the adjustment of an autoregressive model for the residuals was applied to correct the bias of seasonal streamflow forecasts. Hence, for the calibration and validation period, the results show that the HBV model provides better results to represent the hydrological conditions at each hydropower plant, presenting NSE and NSElog values greater than 0.8 and 0.9, respectively, during the calibration stage. However, the SMAP model achieves a better performance with NSE values of up to 0.5 for the raw forecasts. In addition, the bias correction displayed a significant improvement in the forecasts for all hydrological models, specifically for the representation of streamflow during dry periods, significantly reducing the variability of the residuals.