Exercises Hydrological Modelling
Academic year: 2025 - 2026
1 Introduction
This book contains exercises for the course Hydrological Modelling at Ghent University. The focus of this set of exercises will be on rainfall-runoff modelling with a conceptual hydrological model.
The objective of the practical exercises of this course is to illustrate some of the most important steps necessary to perform a proper modelling of a medium-scale catchment in Flanders. Only some specific steps of the process will be illustrated here across 5 exercises:
- Delineation of the catchment (Chapter 4)
- Implementation of a hydrological model (Chapter 5)
- Calibration of the hydrological model (Chapter 6)
- The analysis of uncertainty in the model output of the model (Chapter 7)
- Assimilation of observations into the model (Chapter 8).
Needless to say that for each step, there are many options, and that the choice for e.g. a specific model, calibration algorithm, or evaluation criterium depends on the specific situation, the aim of the modelling exercise, and the personal taste of the modeller. For an extensive – yet non-exhaustive – overview of different techniques in hydrological modelling, we refer to the theoretical course notes and specialized literature.
The aim of the practicals is to:
- Make you acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of the selected algorithms,
- Make you aware of the potential problems related to modelling rainfall-runoff relationships, and
- Point you to and make you reflect on existing alternatives for the algorithms selected here.