Improvement and Comparative Assessment of a New Hydrological Modelling Approach for the Ouémé River Basin (Bénin), West Africa

Abstract:

Assessing water resources is still an important issue especially in the context of climatic changes. Although numerous hydrological models exist, new approaches are still under investigation. In this context, we propose a new modelling approach based on the Physics Principle of Least Action. A first version of a Least Action based model, in its deterministic version has already given very good results on simulating the Bétérou catchment in the Ouémé basin, Benin. The paper presents new hypotheses to go further in the model development with a view of widening its application. The improved version of the model MODYPMA was applied on 22 subcatchments in Africa, in Bénin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia; in Europe, and in the USA. Its performance was compared to two well known lumped conceptual models, the GR4J and HBV models.

The model could be successfully calibrated and validated; it shows a good performance for a range of scales but a limited applicability to catchments smaller than 500 km² . The analysis revealed that the three models have similar performance and timing errors. The parameter uncertainty was analysed using the GLUE methodology. It is concluded that model uncertainty is higher during high flows and that uncertainty analysis should include the uncertainty of the discharge data. Finally, some aspects that further research must address are brought out.