The SAFRAN‐ISBA‐MODCOU hydrometeorological model applied over France

The hydrometeorological model SIM consists of a meteorological analysis system (SAFRAN), a land surface model (ISBA), and a hydrogeological model (MODCOU). It generates atmospheric forcing at an hourly time step, and it computes water and surface energy budgets, the river flow at more than 900 river‐gauging stations, and the level of several aquifers. SIM was extended over all of France in order to have a homogeneous nationwide monitoring of the water resources: it can therefore be used to forecast flood risk and to monitor drought risk over the entire nation. The hydrometeorological model was applied over a 10‐year period from 1995 to 2005. In this paper the databases used by the SIM model are presented; then the 10‐year simulation is assessed by using the observations of daily streamflow, piezometric head, and snow depth. This assessment shows that SIM is able to reproduce the spatial and temporal variabilities of the water fluxes. The efficiency is above 0.55 (reasonable results) for 66% of the simulated river gauges, and above 0.65 (rather good results) for 36% of them. However, the SIM system produces worse results during the driest years, which is more likely due to the fact that only few aquifers are simulated explicitly. The annual evolution of the snow depth is well reproduced, with a square correlation coefficient around 0.9 over the large altitude range in the domain. The streamflow observations were used to estimate the overall error of the simulated latent heat flux, which was estimated to be less than 4%.