Die Bodenkultur - Journal for Land Management, Food and Environment

M. E. Rial-Rivas, J. P. Nunes, A. K. Boulet, A. J. D. Ferreira., C. O. A. Coelho and J. J. Keizer:

Addressing input data uncertainties in the hydrological simulation of a small forested catchment in north-central Portugal

Summary

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was employed to carry out a calibration and sensitivity analysis for a small forested catchment in North-Central Portugal. A regional data set allowed obtaining good results with SWAT at the monthly scale but only acceptable model results for daily time steps. The Nash-Sutcliffe model efficiency (ENS) for the validation runoff data was 0.82 and 0.49, respectively. Sensitivity analysis was carried for a total of 20 SWAT parameters. It highlighted the possible importance of groundwater and/or lateral flow in the SWAT results obtained by manual and auto-calibration. Key words: SWAT, parameter uncertainties, sensitivity analysis, autocalibration.