Semi-distributed hydrological characteristics and their sensitivity to climatic factors in the Huancane River basin, Peru

The use of water resources in a basin is based on the availability of surface runoff, which is affected by both climatic factors and physiographic characteristics, among other aspects. The objective of the research was to evaluate the performance of the semi-distributed hydrological models Hydrologiska Byrans Vattenbalansavdelning (HBV) and Sacramento Soil Moisture Accounting (SAC) for the Huancane River basin using the hydrological and hydraulic modeling platform RS MINERVE. The Huancane watershed was delimited and divided into 09 contribution zones from the gauging station. For the hydrological modeling, hydro-meteorological information was used in daily time steps from January 1991 to December 2015. The calibration phase was carried out from January 1991 to December 2010 and the validation phase from January 2011 to December 2015. An efficiency measure was used to evaluate the simulated series against the observed daily flow rates, such as the Nash-Sutcliffe ratio, the logarithmic Nash coefficient (Nash-ln), the Pearson correlation coefficient, and the relative root mean square error (RRMSE). The results obtained in the study show that the HBV and SAC-SMA models describe the sequence of observations with high accuracy, being more representative in the dry season; both models have some incompatibilities regarding the rainy season, failing to properly represent the extreme values, which is attributed to the climatic parameters involved. Likewise, we can highlight that the model with the largest number of SAC-SMA parameters has a better performance than the HBV model, both in the calibration and validation stages.