Calibration of a hydrological model and sensitivity analysis of its parameters: A case study of Seonath river basin

The objective of this paper is surface runoff estimation of the Seonath river basin using a semi-distributed hydrological model, i.e., soil and water assessment tool (SWAT). In this paper, the study on calibration and sensitivity is carried out using SWAT-CUP (calibration and uncertainty program) along with sequential uncertainty fitting (SUFI-2) algorithm. The performance of SWAT model is evaluated by various statistical measures; such as Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) coefficient, coefficient of determination (R2), percent bias (Pbias), p factor, r factor and ratio of the root-mean-square error (RMSE) to the standard deviation of the observation (RSR). In the current work, 31 years (1980–2010) of weather data was used. The time slice for model calibration was 15 years, i.e., 1987–2001 with seven years of warming period 1980–1986 and validation period was comprised of nine years (2002–2010). In the study, the calibration of the model was done for the two stations which is a major step for carrying out further study related to climate and land use change impact assessment. The study yielded satisfactory results in terms of model performance. Copyright © 2019 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.