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Calibration Strategies for Improved Hydrological Predictions inLake-dominated River Systems


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Created: May 11, 2026 at 7:03 p.m. (UTC)
Last updated: May 14, 2026 at 2:22 p.m. (UTC) (Metadata update)
Published date: May 14, 2026 at 2:22 p.m. (UTC)
DOI: 10.4211/hs.7bcc61a8c48c4e6eabe838ee77103f7b
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Abstract

Efficiently and accurately calibrating and modelling watersheds with hundreds of lakes and mixed observational data remains a key challenge for developing reliable forecasting tools. This study assesses a range of calibration strategies for the routing of water through lakes and rivers in the Southeastern region of Ontario. The routing model, implemented within the Raven Hydrological Modelling Framework, is forced with runoff from Environment and Climate Change Canada's GEM-Hydro model and incorporates over 40 streamflow and lake level gauges screened for anthropogenic influence. We compared several global and local calibration strategies, optimizing routing model parameters including bias correction, baseflow parameters, routing coefficients, and lake crest widths. In the global calibrations, we applied a single multi-metric objective function that incorporated discharge and lake water levels, whereas the parameters were calibrated locally for gauge-specific sub-regions in local calibration. In local calibration of the model, the median Kling Gupta Efficiency (KGE) of the river discharge was improved from 0.37 to 0.73 compared to the baseline experiment. Moreover, the local calibration improved discharge predictions at 88.6% of gauges during the calibration period and 67.7% during validation compared to global calibration. Median KGE increased from 0.62 under global calibration to 0.78 with the local approach. Lake level simulations also benefit from individual crest width calibration, with KGE deviation without accounting for bias improving from 0.72 to 0.88. We also found that spatially distributed bias correction of runoff inputs enhances discharge accuracy, with improvements showing some correlation with underlying geology. These findings emphasize the value of localized calibration for capturing site-specific hydrological dynamics and recommend locally updating lake crest width estimates to improve lake parameterization in semi-distributed models.

Subject Keywords

Coverage

Spatial

Coordinate System/Geographic Projection:
WGS 84 EPSG:4326
Coordinate Units:
Decimal degrees
North Latitude
46.3000°
East Longitude
-79.0000°
South Latitude
44.0000°
West Longitude
-74.0000°

Content

README.md

Experminet Folders

0.BAS_00 - BASELINE 1.GLB_00 - GLB 0 2.GLB_01 - GLB 1 3.GLB_02 - GLB 2 4.LOCAL_00 - LOCAL 0 5.LOCAL_01 - LOCAL 1 6.LOCAL_02 - LOCAL 2

Supplementary Experiments

S1.LOCAL_0b - Only Baseflow S2.LOCAL_0c - Only River Routing S3.LOCAL_0d - Only Catchment Routing S4.LOCAL_0f - Only Lake Crest Widths

Model

02KF010.tar.gz - a sample regional model

Files

SE_Diagnostics.csv - Diagnostics SE_Hydrographs.csv - Hydrographs SE_ReservoirStages.csv - Time series of Lake Stages SE_WatershedStorage.csv - Time series ofWatershed Storage Raven_error.txt - warning and error in the model run SE_solution.rvc - Model initiation file

Credits

Funding Agencies

This resource was created using funding from the following sources:
Agency Name Award Title Award Number
Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources Collaborative Research Agreement between Dr. Tolson and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources None
Environment and Climate Change Canada 2023-2025 G&C research agreement between Dr. Craig and Environment and Climate Change Canada None

How to Cite

Revel, M., B. Tolson, J. Craig, H. Shen, E. Gaborit, M. Han (2026). Calibration Strategies for Improved Hydrological Predictions inLake-dominated River Systems, HydroShare, https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.7bcc61a8c48c4e6eabe838ee77103f7b

This resource is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CC-BY

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