Influence of geometry, grid resolution, initial conditions and hydraulic soil parameters for the integrated coupled hydrological model Parflow-CLM

In this work, the parallel and fully integrated coupled hydrologic model Parflow-CLM was used to simulate the water and energy fluxes in a 4.2 km² mountainous headwater catchment in the Odenwald, Germany, for a period of three years at hourly resolution. First, to establish the most time-efficient configuration of the model able to describe the observed discharges of the catchment, different definitions of the numerical domain for a fixed set of parameters along with different horizontal and vertical grid resolutions were compared. Second, with the purpose of achieving a calibrated state of the model, hydraulic soil parameters such as saturated hydraulic conductivities, Van Genuchten parameters, Manning coefficients, and anisotropy factors were optimized. In addition, the influence of the spin-up period was investigated, whereby an spin-up period of eight years was required for each simulation, despite the high computational effort involved, as the different model configurations result in different initial conditions. Finally, computational efforts, subsurface and surface storages, and statistical error measurements related to observed streamflow will be presented, aiming to provide some recommendations to the community about the required complexity for the calibration of complex integrated hydrological models.