Large river basin hydrological modelling using Raven

[surajitdb]

Is Raven capable of performing hydrological simulation of a large river basin of the order of 250,000 sq. km or more? How long it is likely to take to perform such simulation, say for a component like runoff/ discharge? If the river basin is closed, having major reservoirs (large size) data can we still simulate discharge component using Raven?

[rchlumsk]

Raven is made to be flexible and so can model any size basin, the trick is in how a basin of such size should be discretized and represented. The computation time of the simulation is not tied to the size of the basin but the number of units (subbasins, HRUs), number of processes, and of course the machine you are running it on, so I cannot say how long it will take; typically Raven model runs are in the order of seconds, or perhaps a few minutes for complex models/longer simulation periods, depending on the machine being used.

My recommendation would be to start with a simple model and a smaller number of subbasins, perhaps just use one HRU per subbasin for now, and see both the computation time and model results to get a feel for the model. From there you can create finer discretizations and start adding more complex processes to better represent your basin.

If the basin is closed, you will have to route water into a reservoir with no outflow (based on the stage-discharge curve) instead of specifying a terminal subbasin the rvh file. You will also need to ensure that the reservoir curve supplied is sufficient in terms of stage-volume relationships for the model simulation, i.e. that you do not have volumes/stages exceeding those specified in the curve provided during the simulation.

[surajitdb]

Hi,
Thanks for the invaluable suggestions provided by you. I hope I can incorporate the suggestions provided by you for my work.

Regards,

Surajit