Toward Climate‐Robust Rainfall Runoff Models: Development and Evaluation of Parameter Libraries That Produce Dependable Predictions Across Diverse Conditions

Abstract

Determining rainfall runoff responses of catchments to unprecedented climate conditions is an issue which has largely eluded the hydrologic community for many years. Conceptual rainfall runoff models are used globally to predict runoff for regional water resources management and planning. However, obtaining parameter values suitable for future climate conditions requires approaches that consider conditions beyond historical periods. This paper takes advantage of data from 207 Australian catchments to determine model parameters that most closely produce expected rainfall runoff coefficients (ratio of runoff to rainfall) for a wide range of environmental conditions. This was done for two popular rainfall runoff models, GR4J and Sacramento. In a two‐step process, parameters were first selected that could adequately reproduce observed runoff coefficients across the 207 catchments. Acceptable parameter sets were stored in a library from which, in the second step, parameters were selected for each individual catchment according to various goodness‐of‐fit metrics. Performance of this calibration approach was compared with a classical optimization employed for each catchment (DELO—Differential Evolution Local Optimization). The study found performance trade‐offs using the parameter library based calibration compared to DELO for metrics such as Nash‐Sutcliffe Efficiency and percentage bias. The library‐based calibration exhibited behavior that more closely aligned with expectations under perturbed climate conditions, compared to DELO parameters. Results also showed tolerable estimates of rainfall runoff coefficient using DELO parameters at many sites when rainfall is reduced by no more than 25%. However, there is a high risk of under‐ or over‐estimating runoff coefficients at larger reductions.