Author(s)

KATERINA KNOPPOVA, DANIEL MARTON

Abstract

Availability of water as a natural resource is affected by the changing climate. To assess local hydrological impacts of climate change, less or more complicated hydrological models are being used. This paper presents a novel rainfall-runoff software, Runoff Prophet, which can simulate monthly discharge in a confluence of any river catchment. Usage of the model is based on monthly climatic and hydrological data as an input with no need of catchment characteristics description such as river slope, catchment slopes, land cover, river net system etc. Model calibration is based on differential evolution optimization algorithm, Thornthwaite evapotranspiration estimation method and set of water balance equations. The developed software was tested in complicated hydrological conditions in the Czech Republic. To assess universality of the newly developed software, model calibration and validation was performed and evaluated for catchments of different types across the Morava River Basin. The applicability of the software was tested for representative catchments classified into five pre-determined categories: i) agricultural, ii) forest, iii) mountain, iv) urbanised, and v) combined land use river basin. It was confirmed that Runoff Prophet is an effective tool for rainfall-runoff modelling with the purpose of long-term projection. In practice, it should be used for predictions of changes in hydrological balance of landscape or for estimations of future water supplies in reservoirs when assessing the current ones, as well as designing new ones.

Keywords

Runoff Prophet, rainfall-runoff model, lumped, hydrological modelling, Nash–Sutcliffe