Assessment of IHACRES Model in Simulating River Discharge in Urmia Lake Basin

Climate change would have direct impacts on water resources.Optimum utilization of water resources and relevant management can be on identification of hydrologic procedures. Surface runoff is among the most important causes of erosion, land degradation, sedimentation in storages and decrease in quality of river water. As it is very difficult to determine all parameters in a basin, a simple model which can predict important factors with few inputs can be very helpful. Surface runoff is very important parameter which can be computed using IHACRES. Herein this research, IHACRES is used in three (daily, monthly and annual) time scale considering climate change status. Base period was 1961-1990 and all the simulation was done considering this period. NSE, MAE, MSE, RMSE, R2, R2 Inv, R2 log, R2sqrt ER and R indexes were used for determining the conciseness of the model. Results show that Mean Error is equal to 6.8%. The model is able to simulate runoff in daily and monthly scale while for annual time scale; it is not advice to use the model.