Analysis of the Relative Importance of Model Parameters in Watersheds with Different Hydrological Regimes

Depending on the purpose of the study, aggregated hydrological models are preferred over distributed models because they provide acceptable results in terms of precision and are easy to run, especially in data scarcity scenarios. To obtain acceptable results in terms of hydrological process representativeness, it is necessary to understand and assess the models. In this study, the relative importance of the parameters of the Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalansavdelning (HBV) model is analyzed using sensitivity analysis to detect if the simulated processes represent the predominant hydrological processes at watershed scale. As a case study, four watersheds with different hydrological regimes (glacial and pluvial) and therefore different dominant processes are analyzed. The results show that in the case of the rivers with a glacial regime, the model performance depends highly on the snow module parameters, while in the case of the rivers with a pluvial regime, the model is sensitive to the soil and evapotranspiration modules. The results are directly related to the hydrological regime, which indicates that the HBV model, complemented by sensitivity analysis, is capable of both detecting and representing hydrological processes at watershed scale.