Investigating the correspondence between catchment properties, function, and model structure representation

Abstract:

Understanding the correspondence between catchment properties (e.g. topography, geology, soils and other landscape characteristics), function (i.e. the dynamics of fluxes and storages), and appropriate model representations is a key objective of hydrological science. A better understanding of these interconnections is in fact at the heart of community efforts such as prediction in ungauged basins and catchment classification. This work focuses on the Attert basin in Luxembourg, which is characterized by significantly different hydrological responses. We started by investigating the behavior of 3 headwater catchments, and we showed how detailed experimental investigations, in combination with model development, allows to progressively uncover the relationship between landscape characteristics and hydrological behaviour. The hypotheses developed at the headwaters scale were then tested at the catchment scale by developing a semi-distributed model, which was applied to the Attert catchment. The model appeared to successfully capture the differences between various subcatchments, indicating that a tentative correspondence between catchment properties, function and model structure representation could be established.