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Shenandoah Watershed Study: Calibration of a Topography‐Based, Variable Contributing Area Hydrological Model to a Small Forested Catchment
Author(s) -
Hornberger G. M.,
Beven K. J.,
Cosby B. J.,
Sappington D. E.
Publication year - 1985
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/wr021i012p01841
Subject(s) - watershed , drainage basin , environmental science , calibration , hydrology (agriculture) , variable (mathematics) , sensitivity (control systems) , geology , statistics , mathematics , geography , computer science , cartography , engineering , mathematical analysis , geotechnical engineering , machine learning , electronic engineering
The topography‐based, variable contributing area model of catchment hydrology of K. J. Beven and E. F. Wood (1983) was adapted for continuous simulation and extended to take account of observed processes in White Oak Run, a small forested catchment in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. Automatic calibration of the model was attempted using eight different objective functions. All objective functions were indifferent to many of the model parameters and thus parameter estimation could not be done reliably. On the basis of results from a regionalized sensitivity analysis, the original model structure was greatly simplified. The parameters of the simplified model, which produced fits to the measured data very nearly as good as did the more complex model, were estimated well using a sum of squared errors criterion.