Sensitivity of Hydrological Modeling to the Type of Meteorological Data and Implication for Climate Change Studies

摘要

There are uncertainties associated with the use of hydrological models. This study aims tornanalyse one source of uncertainty associated with hydrological modeling, particularly in therncontext of climate change studies on water resources. A case study on a watershed of southwesternrnQuébec, Canada using five different sources of meteorological data as input to anrnoffline hydrological model are presented in this paper. Data used came from weather stations,rnNCEP reanalysis, ERA40 reanalysis and two Canadian Regional Climate Model (CRCM) runsrndriven by NCEP and ERA40 reanalysis, providing boundary conditions. To investigate thernsensitivity of simulated streamflow to different types of meteorological data we first calibratedrnthe hydrological model with each of the meteorological data sets over the 1961-1980 period.rnThe five different sets of parameters of the hydrological model were then used to simulaternstreamflow of the 1981-2000 validation period with the five meteorological data sets as inputs.rnThe 25 simulated streamflow series have been compared to the observed streamflow of thernwatershed. The five meteorological data sets do not have the same ability, when used with thernhydrological model, to reproduce streamflow. For climate change impacts assessments onrnwater resources, we have found that there is an uncertainty associated with the meteorologicalrndata used to calibrate the model. For expected changes on annual flows of the ChateauguayrnRiver, our results vary from a small decrease to a small increase.