Developing a parsimonious distributed land surface-subsurface hydrological model

A hydrological model is a simplified representation of the water cycle. A model helps people to understand, predict, and manage water resources. The scope and complexity of the model depend on the modelling goal, availability of required inputs, and computational resources. A wide variety of different hydrologic models exist, which are from simplistic to complex.  Complex models are often computationally very expensive, hampering robust calibration, sensitivity evaluation, and uncertainty analysis. The purpose of this study was to develop a parsimonious distributed land surface-subsurface hydrological model.

The parsimonious model we are developing is a combination of the land surface model V2Karst and a groundwater model that adopts a two-dimensional representation of groundwater flow. V2Karst is a large-scale model for simulating land surface hydrological processes. . The coupled hydrological model can make the simulation steps clearer and meet the simplifying assumptions in some specific demand situations. The model will be useful for robust model calibration, sensitivity tests, and uncertainty analysis.