The description of catchment response (in terms of both water and solute discharges) is one of the classical and very fundamental issues in hydrology and geoscience, bearing also significant socio-economic implications, e.g., flood mitigation, water resources management, pollution control. Even though major advances have been achieved, particularly over the last decades, some of the basic governing physical processes remain poorly understood. Although qualitative descriptions of the various components of the hydrological cycle are well known from the literature, detailed, accurate quantification of water fluxes of fundamental hydrological processes at various scales (rainfall-runoff-infiltration partitioning, flood formation, etc.) remains a challenge. Process-based hydrological models represent promising tools for addressing important unanswered questions related to water and solute fluxes within river basins.

This session aims to bring together the integrated hydrological modeling community to focus on recent developments and applications of process-based models simulating surface–subsurface coupled flow and transport processes at the catchment scale. We encourage submissions pertaining to all aspects of integrated catchment modeling including, but not limited to: new coupling methodologies for processes across the different compartments of the terrestrial hydrological cycle (e.g., interactions and feedback with climate and vegetation as well as between water, energy, carbon, and nutrient cycles); representation of novel hydrologic processes; integration of groundwater dynamics into atmospheric processes; transport applications to interpret tracer tests and hydrograph separation issues; feedbacks from experimental investigations for further testing of process representation in models; links with hydrogeophysics and remote sensing for model parameterization; and data assimilation in process-based catchment models.

Confirmed invited speaker:
Stefan J. Kollet (s.kollet@fz-juelich.de), Research Centre Juelich and Bonn University, Germany.