An Improved Zhang's Dynamic Water Balance Model Using Budyko‐Based Snow Representation for Better Streamflow Predictions

Abstract

Sufficient understanding of the hydrological processes and catchment controls is essential for predicting water availability and enhancing water resources reliability for human society and ecology. In this regard, several critical studies have shown that the intricate interactions between climatic forcings (precipitation and temperature/ potential evapotranspiration) and catchment characteristics are the dominant controls for the water balance of a catchment (Eagleson, 1978;Farmer et al., 2003;Milly, 1994;Zhou et al., 2015). Accordingly, hydroclimatic models are often adopted to simplify the complex hydroclimatological process by selectively amplifying a system's fundamental aspects at the expense of incidental details. Thus, a model is considered ideal when it is simple enough to understand and use while complex enough to reflect the hydrological process (Anderson & Burt, 1985). To this end, numerous hydrological models have been developed along with the advances in hydrology, data collection, and computational capability (