Calibration and Evaluation of the WRF-Hydro Model in Simulating the Streamflow over the Arid Regions of Northwest China: A Case Study in Kaidu River Basin

Abstract

In this study, the hydrological system of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF-Hydro) is applied to simulate the streamflow at the Kaidu River Basin, which is vital to the ecological system in the lower reaches of the Tarim River in Northwest China. The offline WRF-Hydro model is coupled with the Noah multi-parameterization land surface model (Noah-MP) and is forced by the China Meteorological Forcing Dataset (CMFD), with the grid spacing of the hydrological routing modules being 250 m. A 3-year period (1983–1985) is used for calibration and a 17-year period (1986–2002) for the evaluation. Several key parameters of WRF-Hydro and four Noah-MP parameterization options are calibrated, and the performance of WRF-Hydro with the optimized model setting is evaluated using the daily streamflow observations. The results indicate that WRF-Hydro can reproduce the observed streamflow reasonably, with underestimation of the streamflow peaks. The simulated streamflow is sensitive to the parameters of bexp, dksat, smcmax, REFKDT, slope, OVROUGHRTAC and mann in the Kaidu River Basin. At the same time, the parameterization options of Noah-MP also have a large influence on the streamflow simulation. The WRF-Hydro model with optimized model settings can achieve correlation coefficient (CC) and Nash efficiency coefficient (NSE) statistical scores of 0.78 and 0.61, respectively, for the calibration period. Meanwhile, for the evaluation period, the scores are 0.7 and 0.50, respectively. This study indicates the importance of applying the physical-based WRF-Hydro model over Northwest China and provides a reference for the nearby regions.