Diagnosing the impacts of landscape characteristics on hydrologic signatures in the Krycklan catchment in Sweden using a flexible hydrological model

Renkui Guo, Babak Mohammadi, Hongkai Gao, Junzhi Liu, Zheng Duan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This study investigated the applicability and performance of a hydrological model (namely FLEXG) for simulating streamflow in boreal catchment, exemplified by the representative Krycklan catchment. The FLEXG simulated daily streamflow for the whole catchment and its sub-catchments. The Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) and Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) demonstrated favorable model performance during the calibration period (KGE = 0.88 and NSE = 0.75) and the subsequent validation (KGE = 0.81 and NSE = 0.63) period for the Krycklan catchment. Notably, a high degree of congruence was observed across eight sub-catchments, with KGE values consistently exceeding the threshold of 0.7 during both calibration and validation periods. These findings underscore the FLEXG model's aptitude for simulating streamflow within boreal catchments, as evidenced by its ability to capture seasonal patterns across the catchment. Additionally, regression analysis was conducted to examine the intricate relationships between model parameters and varied catchment characteristics. These catchment characteristics were identified as pivotal factors influencing streamflow modelling in the study region. Specifically, it was established that catchment size shows a negative correlation with the splitter D (R2 = 0.7), a parameter intimately associated with both fast and slow recession periods. The proportion of forest cover was negatively correlated with the slow response reservoir recession coefficient, Kf (R2 = 0.57), whereas the proportion of wetland cover displayed a positive correlation with Ks (R2 = 0.54). These correlations underscore the substantive impact of land use patterns on streamflow generation dynamics within the boreal catchment context.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103565
JournalPhysics and Chemistry of the Earth
Volume134
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024 Jun

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This study was supported by the Crafoord Foundation (No. 20200595 and No. 20210552 ) and Stiftelsen Oscar och Lili Lamms Minne ( DO 2021-0019 ). We also want to acknowledge the KCS project ( https://www.slu.se/en/departments/forest-ecology-management/environment/krycklan/ ) for providing the Krycklan guide and geographical data. And we acknowledge the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science (SITE, https://data.fieldsites.se/portal/ ) for supporting climate and streamflow data. We express our gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped us improve the quality of our manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s)

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Oceanography, Hydrology, Water Resources
  • Probability Theory and Statistics

Free keywords

  • Boreal catchment
  • Catchment characteristics
  • FLEX model
  • Krycklan
  • Model parameter
  • Streamflow

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