Evaluating the present annual water budget of a Himalayan headwater river basin using a high-resolution atmosphere-hydrology model

In the study, a two-way coupled implementation of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and the WRF-Hydro hydrological modeling extension package (WRF/WRF-Hydro) was employed in its offline configuration, over a 10year simulation period for a mountainous river basin in North India.

A triple nest is employed, in which the innermost domain had 3km for atmospheric model grids and 300m for hydrological components. Two microphysical parameterization (MP) schemes are quantitatively evaluated to reveal how differently MP influences orographic-related precipitation and how it impacts hydrological responses. The WRF-Hydro modeling system shows reasonable skill in capturing the spatial and temporal structure of high-resolution precipitation, and the resulting stream flow hydrographs exhibit a good correspondence with observation at monthly timescales, although the model tends to generally underestimate streamflow amounts.