Assessing the performance of global hydrological models for capturing peak river flows in the Amazon basin

Towner, J., Cloke, H. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-868X, Zsoter, E., Flamig, Z., Hoch, J. M., Bazo, J., Coughlan de Perez, E. and Stephens, E. M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5439-7563 (2019) Assessing the performance of global hydrological models for capturing peak river flows in the Amazon basin. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 23 (7). pp. 3057-3080. ISSN 1027-5606 doi: 10.5194/hess-23-3057-2019

Abstract/Summary

Extreme flooding impacts millions of people that live within the Amazon floodplain. Global hydrological models (GHMs) are frequently used to assess and inform the management of flood risk, but knowledge on the skill of available models is required to inform their use and development. This paper presents an intercomparison of eight different GHMs freely available from collaborators of the Global Flood Partnership (GFP) for simulating floods in the Amazon basin. To gain insight into the strengths and shortcomings of each model, we assess their ability to reproduce daily and annual peak river flows against gauged observations at 75 hydrological stations over a 19-year period (1997–2015). As well as highlighting regional variability in the accuracy of simulated streamflow, these results indicate that (a) the meteorological input is the dominant control on the accuracy of both daily and annual maximum river flows, and (b) groundwater and routing calibration of Lisflood based on daily river flows has no impact on the ability to simulate flood peaks for the chosen river basin. These findings have important relevance for applications of large-scale hydrological models, including analysis of the impact of climate variability, assessment of the influence of long-term changes such as land-use and anthropogenic climate change, the assessment of flood likelihood, and for flood forecasting systems.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/85114
Identification Number/DOI	10.5194/hess-23-3057-2019
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	Copernicus
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