Lumped hydrological models can represent rainfall-runoff processes at the level of the entire basin and thus reproduce different hydrological processes. They present one of the options available for rainfall-runoff modeling. They can be used for water resources management, water system design, real time forecasting and flood design.
As a part of the master thesis we applied the lumped conceptual hydrological model incorporated in the airGR package and tested its usefulness and the performance on various catchments that are part of the Sava basin, which were selected based on the discharge data availability. We used various model options included in the airGR package, that have different number of model parameters. These models were evaluated using different model performance criteria that are mainly used in hydrology and compare modelled and measured discharge. We have also demonstrated how the length of the time series used for calibration and validation impacts on model performance. With GIS tools we performed analysis of the nonhomogeneous catchment properties on the model performance.
On average, the results indicated that the models performed better on larger basins and when using more parameters rather than less. The later was especially evident in case of the snow dominated basin, where the performance of the model was improved when taking into account snow module included in the airGR package. In the analysis of nonhomogeneity better model performance was obtained for basins with a higher proportion of high runoff potential and with smaller variations in meteorological variables.
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