Resumen de HMET: a simple and efficient hydrology model for teaching hydrological modelling, flow forecasting and climate change impacts
Jean-Luc Martel, Kenjy Demeester, François P. Brissette, Richard Arsenault, Annie Poulin
Hydrological models are commonly used to forecast streamflow and for climate change impact studies. There is a widerange of hydrology models using lumped conceptual approaches all the way to more physically based distributedalgorithms. Most of these models come with a steep learning curve before they can be used efficiently by the end user, andthey canbe tricky to calibrate appropriately. Only a small number of hydrologymodels can be considered easyto set up anduse, and even fewer provide their source code for easy modification to be tailored to individual needs. These drawbacksmake it difficult to use these models in educational applications. The goal of this paper is to introduce a very simple, yetefficient, lumped-conceptual hydrological model designed to address the above problems. The MATLAB-based HMETShydrological model is simple and can be easily and quickly set up on a new watershed, including automatic calibrationusing state of the art optimization algorithms. Despite its simplicity, the model has proved to perform well against twoother lumped-conceptual hydrological models over 320 watersheds. HMETS obtained a median Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiencyof 0.72 in validation, compared to 0.64 for MOHYSE (similar structure) and 0.77 for HSAMI (more complex structure).The model’s source code is freely available and includes an optional simplified user interface. A climate change impactssimulation tool using the constant scaling downscaling method is also incorporated to the interface. HMETS has beentested in the Construction Engineering Final-Year Project for a group of 60 undergraduate students.
