Hydrological Modeling of Snow Accumulation and Melting on River Basin Scale

Snowmelt is of importance for many aspects of hydrology, including water supply, erosion and flood control. In this study, snow accumulation and melt are modeled using a distributed hydrological model with two different snowmelt simulation modules. The model is applied for simulating river discharge in the Latyan dam watershed, in the southern part of central Alborz mountain range, Iran. The data consists of 3 years of observed daily precipitation, air temperature, potential evaporation, windspeed and discharge. The discharge data is used for model calibration. When using the temperature index method for snowmelt three parameters need to be calibrated, while for the energy balance approach all parameters are preset and not optimized. The model performance is satisfactory for both methods with efficiencies of more than 80%. In order to show the performance of the model, two interesting snow accumulation and melt periods are discussed in detail. This study shows that the model has great potentiality to simulate the impact of snow accumulation and melt on the hydrological behavior of a river basin. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009