The use of GRDC gauging stations for calibrating large-scale hydrological models

The Global Runoff Data Centre provides time series of observed discharges that are very valuable for calibrating and validating the results of hydrological models. We address a common issue in large-scale hydrology which, though investigated several times, has not been satisfactorily solved. Grid-based hydrological models need to fit the reported station location to the river network depending on the resolution, to compare simulated discharge with observed discharge. We introduce an Intersection over Union ratio approach to selected station locations on a coarser grid scale, reducing the errors in assigning stations to the wrong basin. We update the 10-year-old database of watershed boundaries with additional stations based on a high-resolution (3 arcseconds) river network, and we provide source codes and high- and low-resolution watershed boundaries.