Development and Application of a Distributed Hydrological Model for Discharge Predictions in Un-gauged Basins: Case Study in Malian River Basin

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Information about water resources is generally derived from the discharge or flow measured at gauging stations on river. In fact, gauged stations are relatively sparsely installed, not matching the high density of existing and planning engineering. The situation is extremely unfavourable for construction planning and water resources development. With an aim of making a good hydrological simulation in un-gauged basins, this article presents an approach to simulate the flow series for solving the problem induced by data scarcity at un-gauged hydrological engineering sites. The distributed hydrological model constructed in the article performs well in describing the mechanisms for the hydrological processes. It makes good and physical interpolation of response information from gauged to un-gauged basins, with few parameters to calibrate than other distributed models. To make sure that it is available and useful, the proposed approach is applied to the case study of Malian river basin, which is treated as a scarcely gauged basin. The performance of runoff simulation yielded moderate results in the approach, with Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency greater than 0.60, amount error less than 7%, runoff correlation coefficient greater than 0.85. As for the view of project planning, the accuracy can meet the requirement of planning at un-gauged sites. The outcomes confirm the potential of the proposed approach and show that the distributed model can be available and feasible for hydrological simulation in un-gauged basins, providing hydrologists with sufficient discharge data for analysis in un-gauged or scarcely gauged basins.