Catchments that do not behave the way the hydrologist expects, expose the frailties of hydrological science, particularly its unduly simplistic treatment of input and model uncertainty. A conceptual rainfall– runoff model represents a highly simplified hypothesis of the transformation of rainfall into runoff. Sub-grid variability and mis-specification of processes introduce an irreducible model...

Multi-objective evaluation of distributed hydrological models enables an analysis of prediction behaviour of individual sub-systems within a catchment. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate an application of multi-response, multisite calibration strategy for a distributed hydrological model, so that model limitations can be identified and subsequently improved. The study was carried out for c...

The hydrological budget of a region is determined based on the horizontal and vertical water fluxes acting in both inward and outward directions. These integrated water fluxes vary, altering the total water storage and consequently the gravitational force of the region. The time-dependent gravitational field can be observed through the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravimetric...

This paper asks a simple question: if humans and their actions co-evolve with hydrological systems (Sivapalan et al., 2012), what is the role of hydrological scientists, who are also humans, within this system? To put it more directly, as traditionally there is a supposed separation of scientists and society, can we maintain this separation as sociohydrologists studying a socio-hydrological wor...

Large-scale hydrological modelling has become increasingly wide-spread during the last decade. An annual workshop series on large-scale hydrological modelling has provided, since 1997, a forum to the German-speaking community for discussing recent developments and achievements in this research area. In this paper we present the findings from the 2007 workshop which focused on advances and visio...

A global ocean general circulation model (GCM) with idealized geometry (two basins of equal size, Marotzke and Willebrand, 1991) is coupled to an energy balance atmospheric model with nonlinear parameterizations of meridional atmospheric transports of heat and moisture. With the coupled model that prescribes the atmospheric heat and moisture transports, the North Atlantic meridional mass overtu...

In the last decades RS and GIS technology have been increasingly used for hydrological applications. Hydrological parameters estimation is strongly related to land cover composition. This study examines the impact of different approaches to estimate land cover distribution on the prediction and the spatial pattern of surface runoff. Land cover fractions are derived at sub-pixel scale from CHRIS...

Due to biases in the output of climate models, a bias correction is often needed to make the output suitable for use in hydrological simulations. In most cases only the temperature and precipitation values are bias corrected. However, often there are also biases in other variables such as radiation, humidity and wind speed. In this study we tested to what extent it is also needed to bias correc...