Calibration of North American basins

We performed a calibration of basins in North America using stations in Canada retrieved from Water Survey Canada (WSC) and in the United States retrieved by from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Our simulation period is January 1991 to December 2010 with the 2 prior years regarded as warm-up. We selected only stations that had at least 5 years observed streamflow available during this 20 year period. In total 3826 stations are calibrated.

We used the Ostrich calibration toolbox for calibrating the model. The Dynamically Dimensioned Search (DDS) algorithm with a budget of 2000 model eveluations was employed to maximize the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE). We performed 10 independent trials (each 2000 evaluations) and report the best results. The setups can be downloaded by clicking on the watershed on the main page and select "calibrated model setup (zip)".

The following map will report NSE (calibrated) as well as the Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) and the Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE). The latter two are not calibrated but derived using the run leading to the best Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency. Be aware that the RMSE are absolute estimates; they are not normalized regarding basin area etc.