Doing hydrology backwards in tropical humid catchments

Abstract:

Top-down approaches in hydrology offer the possibility to predict water fluxes at the catchment scale based on the interpretation of the observed hydrological response at the catchment itself. Doing hydrology backwards (inferring precipitation and evapotranspiration rates at the catchment scale from streamflow measurements, see Kirchner (2009)) can be a useful methodology for estimating water fluxes at the catchment and regional scales. Previous studies using this inverse modeling approach have been performed in regions (UK, Switzerland, France, Eastern US) where energy-limited (in winter and early spring) and water-limited conditions (in summer) prevail during a large period of the year. However, such approach has not been tested in regions characterized by a quasi-constant supply of water and energy (e.g. humid tropics). The objective of this work is to infer annual rates of precipitation and evapotranspiration over the last decade in 10 catchments located in Mexico’s tropical humid regions. Hourly discharge measurements during recession periods were analyzed and parameters for the nonlinear storage-discharge relationship of each catchment were derived. Results showed large variability in both catchment-scale precipitation and evapotranspiration rates among the selected study sites. Finally, a comparison was done between such estimates and those obtained from remotely-sensed data (TRMM for precipitation and MOD16 for evapotranspiration).