Evaluating the Efficiency of Reanalysis Evapotranspiration for Calibration of Distributed Hydrological Model in Data-Limited Areas

The lack of required datasets over the catchments impose basic problems for applying hydrologic models. By increasing the satellite-based technologies over the past decades, several water balance components have been developed by using remote sensing and data assimilation techniques. This research addresses the efficiency of evapotranspiration values which are obtained from the reanalysis models (GLEAM, W3RA and HBV) for calibration of VIC-3L hydrologic model over the SefidRood basin (SRB). Results showed that using the evapotranspiration dataset, which is estimated by GLEAM, is the best for calibration of VIC-3L (NS=0.56 and CC=0.80) and simulating the streamflow at the outlet of SRB. Also, using the HBV reanalysis model’s results, in both daily and monthly time scales, with the KGE=0.64 leads to the better performance in simulating streamflow when comparing to the base scenario (calibration of VIC-3L model with the observed streamflow data). Finally, results indicated that using W3RA and GLEAM datasets improved the VIC-3L performance in estimation of runoff volume and the maximum relative error restricted to only 4.0 %.