The Unexploited Treasures of Hydrological Observations Beyond Streamflow for Catchment Modeling

Abstract

While measured streamflow is commonly used for hydrological model evaluation and calibration, an increasing amount of data on additional hydrological variables is available. These data have the potential to improve process consistency in hydrological modeling and consequently for predictions under change, as well as in data‐scarce or ungauged regions. Here, we show how these hydrological data beyond streamflow are currently used for model evaluation and calibration. We consider storage and flux variables, namely snow, soil moisture, groundwater level, terrestrial water storage, evapotranspiration, and altimetric water level. We aim at summarizing the state‐of‐the‐art and providing guidance for the use of additional hydrological variables for model evaluation and calibration. Based on a review of the current literature, we summarize observation methods and uncertainties of currently available data sets, challenges regarding their implementation, and benefits for model consistency. The focus is on catchment modeling studies with study areas ranging from a few km 2 to ~500,000 km 2 . We discuss challenges for implementing alternative variables that are related to differences in the spatio‐temporal resolution of observations and models, as well as to variable‐specific features, for example, discrepancy between observed and simulated variables. We further discuss advancements required to deal with uncertainties of the hydrological data and to integrate multiple, potentially inconsistent datasets. The increased model consistency and improvement shown by most reviewed studies regarding the additional variables often come at the cost of a slight decrease in streamflow model performance.