A new very high-resolution climatological dataset in Portugal: Application to hydrological modeling in a mountainous watershed

Publication date: Available online 5 June 2018Source: Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/CAuthor(s): A.R. Fonseca, J.A. SantosAbstractThe study of precipitation and temperature variability in Portugal, including their extremes, is often restricted by the lack of high-resolution gridded datasets at daily timescales and available for sufficiently long time periods. They are of quite importance specially when considering hydrology modeling at a local scale. To overcome this limitation, we develop new high-resolution gridded datasets (∼1 km) of daily precipitation (1950–2015) over Portugal. Daily precipitation is downscaled by ordinary kriging from a coarser gridded dataset (∼20 km). Daily temperatures were retrieved from a previous work and extracted for the target watershed in this study, Corgo River (northern Portugal). The aim of the present study was to investigate the potential of the new high-resolution data in improving the performance of a distributed hydrologic model, Hydrological Simulation Program – FORTRAN (HSPF) in simulating flowrates at one target watershed in northern Portugal (Corgo River watershed), thus providing a practical basis for subsequent hydrological analysis. The performances of the HSPF model, driven by either a single weather station or the new gridded datasets are compared. The results clearly hint at an improved model performance when using our dataset (Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency at daily timescale: 0.34 for th...
Source: Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts ABC - Category: Science Source Type: research