Technical note: Testing the connection between hillslope-scale runoff fluctuations and streamflow hydrographs at the outlet of large river basins

Abstract

Abstract. A series of numerical experiments were conducted to test the connection between streamflow hydrographs at the outlet of large watersheds and the time series of hillslope-scale runoff yield. We used a distributed hydrological routing model that discretizes a large watershed (∼ 17 000 km2) into small hillslope units (∼ 0.1 km2) and applied distinct surface runoff time series to each unit that deliver the same volume of water into the river network. The numerical simulations show that distinct runoff delivery time series at the hillslope scale result in indistinguishable streamflow hydrographs at large scales. This limitation is imposed by space-time averaging of input flows into the river network that are draining the landscape. The results of the simulations presented in this paper show that, under very general conditions of streamflow routing (i.e., nonlinear variable velocities in space and time), the streamflow hydrographs at the outlet of basins with Horton–Strahler (H–S) order 5 or above (larger than 100 km2 in our setup) contain very little information about the temporal variability of runoff production at the hillslope scale and therefore the processes from which they originate. In addition, our results indicate that the rate of convergence to a common hydrograph shape at larger scales (above H–S order 5) is directly proportional to how different the input signals are to each other at the hillslope scale. We conclude that the ability of a hydrological model to replicate outlet hydrographs does not imply that a correct and meaningful description of small-scale rainfall–runoff processes has been provided. Furthermore, our results provide context for other studies that demonstrate how the physics of runoff generation cannot be inferred from output signals in commonly used hydrological models.