SWAT Modelling at Pan European Scale: the Danube Basin Pilot Study

A harmonised pan European assessment of water resources availability and quality as affected by various management options is necessary for a successful implementation of European environmental legislation. In this context we developed a methodology to predict surface water flow and nutrient loads at pan European scale using readily available datasets. Among the hydrological models available, the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) has been selected because its characteristic that make it suitable for large scale applications with limited data requirements. This paper presents the first hydrologic results for the Danube pilot basin. The Danube basin is one of the largest European watersheds covering ca. 803,000 km2 and 14 countries. Modelling data used included pan European land use and management information, a detailed soil map, and high resolution climate data. The Danube basin was divided into 4663 subbasins of an average size of 179 km2. A protocol is proposed to overcome the problems of hydrological regionalization from gauged to ungauged catchments and the over-parameterization and identifiability problems present in calibration. The protocol involves cluster analysis for the determination of hydrological regions, sensitivity analysis at subbasin level and multi-objective calibration using SUFI-2 automated calibration of SWAT-CUP. The proposed protocol was successfully implemented and the modelled discharges captured well the overall hydrologic behaviour of the basin.

PAGLIERO Liliana;  BOURAOUI Faycal;  WILLEMS Patrick;  DIELS Jan; 

2013-03-22

Texas A&M University

JRC65154

http://swat.tamu.edu/media/49257/conference-proceedings.pdf,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC65154,