The mesoscale Hydrologic Model mHM - concept, case studies & model analyses
Presented by Dr. Juliane Mai, Postdoctoral researcher
Group of Multiscale Modeling and Simulation,
Department Computational Hydrosystems (CHS)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ
Abstract
The mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM) developed at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental research is a grid-based distributed model conceptualizing basin hydrological processes as fluxes exchanging water between internal model states. The model has been evaluated in different watersheds ranging from 100 to 500,000 km2 in Germany, Europe and the United States. A key feature of mHM is its parameter estimation technique, known as Multiscale Parameter Regionalization (MPR). This method allows the prediction of spatially distributed parameter fields (e.g., porosity) by connecting physiographic input variables (such as clay content) with transfer parameters (e.g., the coefficients in pedotransfer functions) by transfer functions (e.g., pedotransfer functions). The transfer function parameters are time-invariant and applicable on each grid cell within the study domain.
The first part of the talk will focus on explaining this concept in detail while the second part will concentrate on different model analyses such as model calibration, sensitivity analyses and uncertainty estimation. All these methods are computationally very demanding, i.e. they require thousands of model runs. The actual number of model evaluations, however, scales with the number of model parameters. It is hence beneficial to reduce the number of model parameters and perform the analyses only regarding a small subset of parameters. During the talk an automatic parameter reduction method based on parameter screening will be introduced and the results of the aforementioned many-query applications over Europe will be presented.
Coffee provided - bring your mug!