Using Geostatistical Kriging for Hydrologic Models’ Parameters Estimation on Niger River Watersheds in West Africa

Abstract

Geostatistical Kriging is performed on hydrologic model parameters in a two-dimensional region—different from the geographical space—as a hydrospace. The x-axis in percent is a relative difference of soil characteristics between an embedded 12 watersheds in reference to a large one related to the Niger River in West Africa; noted var_WHC, it stands for Water Holding Capacity. The y-axis in percent, var_Nash, is a hydrologic model’s efficiency in two contexts: (a) calibrated model parameters on the reference watershed are injected in modelling on each sub-watershed in validation phase to produce a series of Nash values as references, (b) a second series of Nash values is produced in calibrations. SimulHyd which stands for Simulation of Hydrological Systems is applied along with a French hydrological model—Genie Rural with 2 parameters at Monthly time step. The built Nash-WHC hydrospace and its two variants, or hybrids, permit the krige of both hydrologic model’s parameters. The relative variation of upper module absolute ranges from 0.1% to 15.68%—the developed hydro-geostatistics practice is considered in reference to hydrological calibration. Accepted as hydrogeostatistics practice, it is applicable to ungauged watersheds to estimate hydrologic models’ parameters.