HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES Hydrol. Process. (2010) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/hyp.

7795

Global-scale river routingan efcient time-delay algorithm based on HydroSHEDS high-resolution hydrography
L. Gong,1,2 * S. Halldin1 and C.-Y. Xu1,2
1 2

Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Villav agen 16, SE-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047, Blindern, NO-0316 Oslo, Norway

Abstract:
Coupling of global hydrologic and atmospheric models is difcult because of the highly nonlinear hydrological processes to be integrated at large scales. Aggregation of high-resolution data into low-resolution spatial distribution functions is one way to preserve information and account for the nonlinearity. We used HydroSHEDS, presently the most highly resolved (300 ) global hydrography available, to provide accurate control on global river routing through a computationally efcient algorithm. The high resolution of HydroSHEDS allowed discrimination of river-channel pixels, and time-delay distributions were calculated for all such pixels. The distributions were aggregated into network-response functions (NRFs) for each lowresolution cell using an algorithm originally developed for the 1-km-resolution HYDRO1k hydrography. The large size of HydroSHEDS required a modication in algorithm to maintain computational efciency. The new algorithm was tested with a high-quality local and a more uncertain global weather dataset to identify whether improved routing would provide a gain when weather data quality was limiting. The routing was coupled to the WASMOD-M runoff-generation model to evaluate discharge from the Dongjiang River and the Willamette River basins. The HydroSHEDS-based routing, compared with the HYDRO1k-based routing, provided a small gain in model efciency, for local and global weather data and for both test basins. The HydroSHEDS-based routing, contrary to the HYDRO1k-based routing, provided physically realistic wave velocities. The most stable runoff-generation parameter values were achieved when HydroSHEDS was used to derive the NRFs. Routing was computed in two steps: rst, a preparatory calculation which was a one-time effort and second, the routing during each simulation. The computational efciency was four to ve orders of magnitude better for the simulation step than that for the preparatory step. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
KEY WORDS

river routing; HydroSHEDS; computational efciency; global scale; time-delay algorithm; aggregation; high-resolution hydrography

Received 17 September 2009; Accepted 13 May 2010

INTRODUCTION Global water resources are commonly assessed by global hydrological models, whereas the interaction between the global hydrological cycle and the atmosphere is commonly studied with land-surface schemes. The two approaches differ in complexity and in land-surface parameterization. Global hydrological models are commonly simpler than land-surface schemes and require less input data and computational resources. However, the lack of feedback mechanisms and their weaker physical foundation lower their ability to predict changes in the hydrological system under changing land use or changing climate. Land-surface schemes, however, commonly lack ability to represent direct anthropogenic inuence on the water cycle, are computationally more demanding, and have seldom, if ever, been tested for equinality or parameter and model-structure uncertainty. Both approaches are weak when it comes to parameterization of the lateral transport of water. This parameterization often uses low-resolution ow networks and routing algorithms developed for smaller scales. This introduces bias
* Correspondence to: L. Gong, Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047, Blindern, NO-0316 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: lebing@gmail.com Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

in transport time and scale dependency in model performance and model parameters (Gong et al., 2009). Large-scale hydrologic and atmospheric modellers put much effort on the scale dependency of their algorithms. Hydrological processes that are integrated to, e.g. a 05 global cell are nonlinear over widely different smaller scales. The use of average values of climate forcing and land-surface properties reduces the spatial variation of those inputs, which in turn reduces the chance of the simulated discharge to cover low and high extremes in space and time. Most global hydrological models currently calculate the water balance on daily or sub-daily scales, whereas validation is carried out over latitude bands and continental and global totals at monthly or annual time scales. Uncertainties at ner scales are seldom dealt with. Although high-resolution ow networks exist, e.g. the 1-km HYDRO1k (USGS, 1996), the lateral transport of water is normally simulated with low-resolution ow networks, the spatial resolutions of which typically range from 05 05 to 4 5 latitudelongitude (Miller et al., 1994). A 05 05 grid (Hageman and Dumenil, 1998; Graham et al., 1999; Renssen and Knoop, 2000; V or osmarty et al., 2000b; D oll and Lehner, 2002) has been found suitable for a broad range of global water-resource and

L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

water-quality studies (V or osmarty et al., 2000a), and it has been adopted by a number of global water-balance models (Arnell, 1999; Fekete et al., 2002; D oll et al., 2003). Most large-scale routing models apply storagebased routing algorithms based on mass conservation and relationships between river-channel storage and river inows and outows. Linear reservoir-routing methods are widely used on large-scale networks because of their conceptual simplicity. Examples are the routing models by Sausen et al. (1994), Miller et al. (1994), and Liston et al. (1994), the HD model (Hagemann and Dumenil, 1998), Total Runoff Integrating Pathways (TRIP) (Oki et al., 1999) and its applications (Oki et al., 2001; Decharme and Douville, 2007; Falloon et al., 2007), HYDrological Routing Algorithm (HYDRA) (Coe, 2000) and its application (Li et al., 2005), Water Transport Model (WTM) (V or osmarty et al., 1989) and its application (Fekete et al., 2006), River Transport Model (RTM) (Branstetter and Erickson, 2003), and the routing model of WaterGap Global Hydrological Model (WGHM) (D oll et al., 2003). The quality of global runoff routing depends on both ow network and routing algorithm. Du et al. (2009) present the effect of grid size on the simulation of a small catchment (259 km2 ) in the humid region in China. They show that changes in the spatial model resolution affect the simulation because of different values of Geographic Information System (GIS)-derived slopes, ow directions, and spatial distribution of ow paths. Three types of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) with grid sizes of 100, 200, and 300 m were used to simulate storm discharge in their study. They concluded that results are poor when grid size is larger than 200 m. Arora (2001) compared runoff routing at 350- and 25-km scales with the same runoff input and concluded that discharge is biased at large scales and also more error-prone at high and low ows. The method of Guo et al. (2004) to scale up contributing area and ow directions is designed to improve decreasing model performance with decreasing spatial resolution. Although the overall performance improves and reaches a maximum at 750 , model performance decreases continuously at increasingly lower resolutions. Yildiz and Barros (2005) found a strong dependency in the Monongahela River basin between simulated runoff components and ow-network resolution, in particular, when using a 5-km resolution instead of a 1-km resolution. Less sub-surface and more surface runoff was simulated as a result of the lower hydraulic gradients. The runoff-generation mechanism was inconsistent with observations at the lower spatial resolution, and it not only resulted in a bad t to observed discharge but also in the hydraulic-conductivity parameter that had to be given non-realistic values to compensate the lower gradients at this resolution (Yildiz and Barros, 2005). Gong et al. (2009) show that cell-to-cell reservoirrouting algorithms are strongly scale dependent. Such a dependency can signicantly alter the routing performance, while at the same time introducing, through calibration, a strong inuence on the water-balance parameter
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

values. It can also, especially in combination with the lack of convective time delays (Beven and Wood, 1993), i.e. an upstream input will have an immediate effect on the downstream output, lead to a considerable drop in performance at large scales. The aggregated network-response function (NRF) algorithm (Gong et al. (2009) aims at overcoming these problems. The NRF algorithm transfers spatially distributed time-delay information extracted from HYDRO1k in the form of simple delay histograms to lower resolution spatial grids. The algorithm is shown to perform equally well and independent of scale for spatial resolutions ranging from 50 to 1 . Storage-based routing methods are computationally at a disadvantage because they require time steps much shorter than the time steps of the runoff-generation algorithms used in global models (Liston et al., 1994; Coe, 1998; Kaspar, 2004; Sushama et al., 2004). The time steps may ultimately be too short for available computational capacity when global water-balance models are extended to ner spatial scales than that commonly used today. NRF routing, however, only requires large computational capacity at an initial stage to aggregate the time-delay distribution to the lower resolution grid for which the runoffgeneration algorithm is intended. The application of the NRF algorithm then does not require a time step different from the runoff-generation algorithm, nor signicantly different computational capacity. HydroSHEDS (Lehner et al., 2008), an even more detailed hydrography than HYDRO1k, was published soon after conclusion of the work by Gong et al. (2009). HydroSHEDS has a spatial resolution of 300 and covers the globe approximately within 60 latitude. Few studies on HydroSHEDS have been reported because the data have been available only for a short time. Getirana et al. (2009) discuss the algorithms used by HydroSHEDS to extract the drainage structure from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data and compare them with more alternative ones. Li et al. (2009) use the HydroSHEDS ow-direction dataset at 300 resolution to drive a combined time-delay and linear reservoir method for operational ood prediction in Lake Victoria. The main purpose of this investigation was to test the costs and benets of using HydroSHEDS instead of HYDRO1k data in the NRF algorithm to derive spatially distributed time-delay information for runoff routing. The goal was met by comparing routing performance, routing parameters, and runoff-generation parameters between HydroSHEDS- and HYDRO1k-based NRF-routing models (Gong et al., 2009). The HydroSHEDS data were used at its native 300 resolution with the NRF routing in two well-studied basins to demonstrate the potential of the method at continental and global scales. Special emphasis was put on the computational efciency of the new algorithm. A second purpose was to evaluate whether there was any signicant gain when time delays were derived from the detailed HydroSHEDS database, compared with HYDRO1k, in a situation where precipitation input was based on the locally uncertain, globally covering data
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

rather than on more certain data, interpolated from dense local high-quality observations.

MATERIALS AND METHOD River basins, climate data, and hydrography We used two well-documented, medium-sized basins, the Dongjiang (East River) basin in southern China [used by Gong et al. (2009)] and the Willamette River basin in north America, to ascertain that the routing-algorithm properties would not be inuenced too much by poor climatic and hydrological data or disturbed by nondocumented regulations by dams and reservoirs or water abstraction. Both basins are still large enough to retain generality of the result in a study of global hydrology. The Dongjiang River is a tributary to the Pearl River with a 25 325-km2 drainage area above the Boluo gauging station. The basin has a dense network of meteorological and hydrological gauging stations, and its hydrology is well studied (e.g. Chen et al., 2006, 2007; Jiang et al., 2007; Jin et al., 2009, 2010). The climate is subtropical with an average annual temperature of around 21 C and only occasional sub-zero winter temperatures in the mountains. The average annual precipitation for the period 19601988 is 1747 mm, and the average annual runoff is 935 mm or 54% of the average annual precipitation. About 80% of the annual rainfall and runoff occur during the wet season from April to September. The basin presents a complex mixture of Pre-Cambrian, Silurian, and Quaternary geological formations showing as granites, sandstone, shale, limestone, and alluvium. The landscape is characterized by 83% mountains and hills, 13% plains, and 38% inland water area. The basin is covered by forest at higher altitudes, whereas intensive cultivation dominates hills and plains. Local daily hydrometeorological data were retrieved for the Dongjiang basin for the period of 19821983. The National Climate Centre of the China Meteorological Administration provided data on air temperature, sunshine duration, relative humidity, and wind speed from seven weather stations inside or close to the basin. Precipitation data from 51 gauges and discharge data from 15 gauging stations were retrieved from the Hydrological Yearbooks of China issued by the Ministry of Water Resources. Potential evaporation was calculated from air temperature, sunshine duration, relative humidity, and wind speed with the PenmanMonteith equation in the form recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (Allen et al., 1998). The Willamette River is located upstream of the Columbia River at Portland. The basin has an area of 29 000 km2 above the Portland gauging station. The Willamette is a large river with a gravel-dominated bed (Hughes and Gammon, 1987), which drains a humid alluvial valley with extensive active and relict oodplains (Parsons et al., 1970). The Willamette Valley lies roughly 80 km from the Pacic Ocean, and prevailing westerly marine winds give it a Mediterranean-type climate (Taylor et al., 1994). The average daily temperature for the
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

period 19962009 is around 8 C and average annual precipitation is around 1180 mm. About 5% of the precipitation falls as snow. Winters are cool and wet, summers warm and dry. Most runoff and ooding are caused by winter rains. Winter rainfall on melting snow is the primary mechanism of generation of ood ows (Waananen et al., 1971; Hubbard et al., 1993). Melting snow at high elevations at the Cascade Range adds a seasonal runoff component during April and May. We did not have access to high-quality local weather data from the Willamette River basin but ran the model only with weather data from global datasets. When running a global water-balance model, only global weather datasets can be used. The water balances of both selected basins were, therefore, modelled for 610 years with weather data from three global remotely sensed or reanalyses datasets. Precipitation data were constructed by combining a 025 and a 1 dataset: the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 dataset (Huffman et al., 2007), which has a coverage between 50 S and 50 N, and the GPCD 1DD dataset (Huffman et al., 2001), which covers the whole globe. TRMM is a recently developed precipitation database based on a combination of infrared measurements from geostationary satellites and passive microwave measurements from polar-orbiting satellites. TRMM has a spatiotemporal resolution of 3 h and 025 latitudelongitude. We rescaled the combined precipitation to 05 through linear interpolation. Air and dewpoint temperatures were obtained from the ERA-interim reanalysis dataset (Simmons et al. 2007). The comparison between local and global datasets for the Dongjiang basin allowed us to assess whether the weather data quality could mask routing improvements. HydroSHEDS (Lehner et al., 2008), a gridded global hydrography with the highest resolution publicly available today, was used to delineate the hydrography of both the basins. HydroSHEDS provides hydrographical information in a consistent and comprehensive format for regional- and global-scale applications. It offers a suite of geo-referenced datasets (vector and raster) at various scales. Available resolutions range from 300 (approx. 90 m at the equator) to 50 (approx. 10 km at the equator) with seamless near-global extent between 56 S and 60 N. The dataset includes river networks, watershed boundaries, drainage directions, and a number of ancillary datasets. HydroSHEDS is derived from elevation data of the SRTM at 300 resolution. The original SRTM data have been hydrologically conditioned using a sequence of automated (void-lling, ltering, stream burning, and upscaling techniques) and manual procedures. Lehner et al. (2008) indicate that the accuracy of HydroSHEDS signicantly exceeds that of other existing global watershed and river maps. The HydroSHEDS dataset does not include upstream areas, so these were derived from ow directions in this work. The high resolution of HydroSHEDS made it possible to identify river pixels, so channel network routing was performed for river pixels only.
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

The HYDRO1k hydrography dataset (USGS, 1996) was used for a comparison with HydroSHEDS for the Dongjiang River basin. HYDRO1k is derived from the GTOPO30 3000 global-elevation dataset and has a spatial resolution of 1 km. The HYDRO1k dataset was developed on a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection in order to maintain uniform grid-cell area. HYDRO1k is hydrographically corrected such that local depressions are removed and basin boundaries are consistent with topographic maps. HYDRO1k includes hydrology-related data layers, such as aspect, ow direction, drainage area, elevation gradient, compound topographic index, basin and sub-basin boundaries, and DEM-derived stream lines. The lower resolution of HYDRO1k did not allow river identication, so we assumed that each HYDRO1k pixel contains some river channel. A global-scale ow network conserving local-scale information We aggregated the hydrography dataset into cells (referred to as global cells in the following), and then connected those global cells through the ows occurring at the borders, i.e. through ow paths that transport water from one cell to another. The procedures to construct HydroSHEDS hydrography for individual cells, to dene border ows, and to construct NRFs for runoff routing are described in subsequent sections. The HydroSHEDS dataset is distributed as 5 tiles covering latitude bands between 56 S and 60 N. Two types of data, the hydrologically conditioned elevations, and ow directions were split into 05 tiles coinciding with the model cells. Prior to the construction of the ow network, slope was calculated for each pixel with the neighbourhood method (Srinivasan and Engel, 1991), which calculates the slope for a centre pixel by considering all its eight neighbour pixels. The area of each pixel was calculated by assuming a spherical earth model. Upstream area and basin boundaries are among most important hydrological features but are usually poorly dened with low-resolution global ow networks. The use of HydroSHEDS ensured that any large river basin could be delineated accurately. Upstream area identication and river-channel routing required an efcient way to index the large number of HydroSHEDS pixels. The position of a pixel in a global cell was indexed by the global cell and its relative position in that cell. Global cells were indexed by a number C depending on their positions. With global cells covering the whole earth, the northwest-most cell (centred on the zero meridian) got an index of 1, its immediate southern neighbour 2, the immediate eastern neighbour cell 361, and so on. Because the resolution of HydroSHEDS is 300 , there are 600 600 pixels within each global cell. Those pixels were indexed with P in the same manner as the global cells. In this way, any pixel can be located by two indices (C, P). The HydroSHEDSconditioned DEM, ow directions, and the derived pixel slopes and areas were stored as individual les for each
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

05

Figure 1. Schematic chart showing the ve-step procedure of extracting ow-path structure and constructing NRF for large-scale, low-resolution cells from the high-resolution HydroSHEDS hydrography. The procedure is performed on HydroSHEDS pixels within each low-resolution cell (local), on pixels bordering low-resolution cells (global), and nally for all cells covering a given basin (basin)

global cell. The ow network, derived from the owdirection data, was rst constructed as local ows within each cell and then as border ows between cells. The border ows were sorted by the ow-accumulation order at the global cell scale. They were then used to derive time-delay distributions and total upstream area for each pixel. A schematic chart (Figure 1) demonstrates the ve-step procedure. Step 1. Each cell was treated as an independent catchment with multiple inows and outows that exchange water at the border lines. The eight possible ow directions provided by HydroSHEDS were translated into a two-column ow-path vector, each row of which represents a single transport from a source pixel to a sink pixel. The sequence of the rows was sorted by the owaccumulation order, i.e. a pixel that released its water to its downstream pixel would never receive its upstream input again. The sequence in the sorted ow-path vector ensured the correct ow accumulation within each global cell in this way. Once the sorted ow-path vector was constructed for each cell, two by-products were derived, namely the local upstream and downstream pixels for all border pixels, i.e. the pixels that have one or two sides on the border of a cell. Step 2. For each global cell, except single-cell islands, there are always some ow paths that start with a border pixel and end with a border pixel in another cell. As pixels were indexed by (C, P), border ows could be identied with different C numbers for source and sink pixels. Those border (global) ows were identied at this stage, and they served as linkages for internal (local) ows inside each global cell. Contrary to previous global ow networks, a global cell in our case was allowed to have multiple inows and outows on its border as well
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

Figure 2. The connection of global-scale ows through downstream pixels of border pixels for (a) the Dongjiang River basin and (b) the Willamette River basin. The global ow paths are used to connect ows between cells and to update upstream areas. The global ow paths derived only from pixels at the low-resolution cell borders greatly simplify the ow-structure complexity, which is used for the basin-scale ow accumulation

as loop ows entering another cell and coming back later. Each large river basin and each continent has a very large number of ow paths at a 300 resolution. This large number could be handled with present-day computational resources by separating the ows into border (global) and within-cell (local) ow paths. The independency of local ows allowed local ow structures to be constructed in parallel for all cells before any large-scale hydrographical or routing calculations were initiated. Only global ows were needed to construct global-scale hydrological features, such as upstream area, and time-delay distribution for large basins and continents. This greatly reduced computation time and memory demand. Step 3. The most important procedure in the conversion of HydroSHEDS ow-direction data into NRFs was to sort the global (border) ows to represent correct ow accumulation. The border ows served as links to transport discharge from one cell to its downstream neighbour. To achieve a correct ow accumulation at the global scale, the same rules were applied to pixels in neighbouring cells as for within-cell pixels, namely any border pixel that released water to a downstream cell was prohibited from receiving water from an upstream cell. The border ows were internally linked with the local downstream pixel at each border, a by-product created in step 1. The local downstream pixel for each border pixel, except for ocean outlets or inland sinks, always started in a border pixel and ended in another border pixel. This feature offered an easy way to combine ows at border pixels with local downstream pixels to form complete ow paths. A global ow-path vector could be constructed in this way for a basin or a continent and then sorted by the ow-accumulation order. The global owpath vector (Figure 2) was much simplied compared with the full ow paths of HydroSHEDS. Step 4. The within-cell (local) upstream area of each border pixel was obtained in step 1 for all global cells. The time delay from each upstream pixel to the corresponding border pixel was calculated simultaneously with the method detailed in step 5. The upstream area and time delay were updated by continuously adding
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

the upstream area and time delay of a certain border pixel to its downstream pixels inside its downstream cell. Each time a border ow path was used for this updation process, the order was taken from the sorted global owpath vector to ensure that the updation was carried out in the order of ow accumulation. For the 25 325-km2 Dongjiang basin, 12 992 border ows had to be updated before all local values of upstream area and time delay could be converted into global values. For basins where discharge data were available, upstream delineation could quickly be done with the aid of the local upstream pixels of each border pixel. The calculation of an upstream area for a given gauging station started in the cell containing the station and then extended into neighbouring cells as dened by the border ows. The border ow indicated the border pixels of the upstream cell that had direct contact, and the upstream area within the cell of those border pixels were immediately included in the total upstream area of the gauging station. This process was iterated until no more upstream cells were found. The registration of a discharge station in HydroSHEDS was done by rst assigning the closest pixel to the reported station coordinates and then by searching for the closest major river channel to the assigned pixel. As the precision of a station location may not always be sufcient, we marked surrounding riverchannel pixels with distinctly high upstream areas. The pixel that best matched the published upstream area for the discharge station was then selected. Step 5. The NRF was obtained for each global cell by aggregating time delays of all river pixels. Whereas each HYDRO1k pixel was assumed to contain a river channel, a HydroSHEDS pixel was required to exceed a certain threshold area (TA) to be recognized as a river pixel. River-channel identication One of the major differences between HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS was the possibility of identifying individual river-channel pixels in the latter dataset. The identication of such pixels was analysed in terms of the
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

trade-off between the gain in keeping as much detailed information as possible and the need to meet computational requirements. The trade-off was analysed by an upstream TA for each pixel, and a range of TA values between 05 and 1000 km2 was tested. Time delays in days, when assuming a unit V45 (see subsequent sections), were obtained for each river pixel and plotted against their corresponding upstream area in order to identify the inuence of river-channel detail on the time delays. Time-delay distributions were then compared for four intervals of upstream area, viz. 0510, 10100, 1001000, and 100010 000 km2 . Whole-basin NRFs were constructed with the four corresponding TA values of 05, 10, 100, and 1000 km2 to show the integrated effect of the time-delay distributions. Runoff generation was assumed to be evenly distributed into the river pixels before the routing was implemented, so only river-channel delay was considered. River-channel identication was only performed on the Dongjiang basin and the selected TA value was then also used on the Willamette basin. Calculation of time delays by HydroSHEDS We used the NRF method of Gong et al. (2009), based on the HYDRO1k hydrography, to calculate ow delays at a 05 latitudelongitude resolution but had to extend it in some respect to account for the native 300 resolution of HydroSHEDS. The slightly modied method is briey described in subsequent sections. Once the river pixels were chosen, a 24-h response function was calculated with the diffusion-wave solution of the full St Venant equations for all river pixels. A daily response function was obtained by integrating the 24-h response functions. The diffusion-wave equation requires both a dispersion coefcient D and a wave velocity c to be calibrated against downstream discharge observations. We found this to introduce equinality between the two parameters without any performance gain. To simplify the method, we made the same assumption as Gong et al. (2009) that the daily pixel-response function could be obtained by integrating the 24-h response functions with near-zero D. The 24-h response function is well approximated by a pure translation of the daily inow according to the wave velocity in this case. The daily response function was specic for each river pixel, so it was named river-response function (RRF) and was used as the source of aggregation: RRF td D
td

This simplication is shown by Gong et al. (2009) to considerably lower the computational demand, while still providing correct travel time for discharge. The d1 and p1 parameters were directly obtained from the travel time t, which is a function of the network wave velocity and network topology. We assumed that the wave velocity was only a function of slope. Following the delay calculation developed by Beven and Kirkby (1979), we denoted the distances of the ow-path segments from any HydroSHEDS pixel down to the reference pixel as l1 , l2 , . . . , ln and the corresponding slopes as tan(b1 ), tan(b2 ), . . ., tan(bn ). We also postulated a normalized network wave velocity (V45 ) for a slope of tan(45 ). We adopted the nding of Gong et al. (2009) that velocity is less sensitive to slope for large-scale than for small-scale water transport and assumed that Vi D V45 tan bi 2

This time-constant velocity led to the following equation for time delay from any given pixel to the reference pixel: n li tD 3 V 45 tan bi iD1 where V45 should be calibrated against observed discharge. There is no need to use meandering factors for the owpathsegment distances because V45 represents an effective network speed. Like other large-scale water-balance studies, we did not calculate runoff generation at the pixel scale. A cell-response function (CRF) was, therefore, derived by aggregating all the RRFs within a cell and normalizing to unit volume: CRF td D 1 n
n

RRFi td
iD1

Q24 t dt

where n (360 000) is the number of pixels in a cell. The aggregation from RRF to CRF transfers distributed delay information, in the form of a daily NRF, to any lower resolution dened by the size of the cell. Equation (4) takes the simplest form of the aggregation by assuming that runoff generation is constant throughout the cell, a condition that could be relaxed to dynamically weigh the aggregation by the sub-cell variation of runoff input. The CRF offers ood-peak attenuation by redistributing a 1-day upstream discharge downstream over 2 (for a pixel) or more (for a cell) days. An NRF to a distributed daily runoff input was nally calculated as
m

where t is the time after runoff generation, td the days after runoff generation, and Q24 the 24-h response function. Each RRF consists of a number of percentages of runoff (p1 , p2 , . . . , pn ) arriving on days (d1 , d2 , . . . , dn ) following the runoff-generating day. When D is assumed to be near zero, the RRF is reduced to two percentages of arriving discharge (p1 , p2 ) for two consecutive days (d1 , d2 ), which are sufciently described by p1 and d1 .
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

NRF td D
j D1

Qj CRFj td

where m is the number of cells covering the basin and Qj is the runoff-generation volume of the jth cell. Equations (4) and (5) indicate that although channel response is represented at the cell level, it still contains all the delay information from the pixel level. This is
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

equivalent to directly using contributing area instead of the number of channel reaches at a given distance away from the outlet. The downstream hydrograph is obtained by the convolution of NRF with the input runoff time series. The CRF derived in this way for a low-resolution cell preserves the full delay information from all HydroSHEDS river pixels. It tells explicitly on which day (2) the generated runoff reaches the reference pixel and the percentage of discharge arriving on each day. The efciency of the algorithm stems from the fact that the demanding calculations of the RRFs and the CRFs are done before the convolution as a one-time preparatory effort for all subsequent simulations. Runoff generation The global water-balance model WASMOD-M is based on the WASMOD (Xu, 2002) monthly conceptual waterbalance model, which has been successfully applied in many parts of the world. Other global water-balance models route their runoff with a ner time step than used for runoff generation (e.g. D oll et al., 2003). The daily version of WASMOD-M was used in this study. It required daily climatic input and generated runoff in each cell with a daily time step. Compared with the monthly WASMOD-M (Wid en-Nilsson et al., 2007), the daily version required its fast- and slow-runoff formulations to be modied, in this case, to a nonlinear exponential form: SP D 1 e
c1 LM

6 7 e
c2 LM

F D Pn SP S D LM 1

All other parts of WASMOD-M took the same form as in Wid en-Nilsson et al. (2007), e.g. actual evaporation (E): 9 E D min[Ep 1 a4 AW/Ep , AW] where SP is the percentage of each cell area that is saturated, LM is the land moisture (water available in each cell for actual evaporation and runoff), F is the fast runoff, S is the slow runoff or base ow, Pn is the net rainfall, AW is the water available for actual evaporation, Ep is the potential evaporation. c1 [mm 1 ], c2 [mm 1 ], and a4 [ ] are parameters, all of which have a potential range from 0 to 1. The equations for Pn , AW, and LM are given by Wid en-Nilsson et al. (2007). The daily WASMOD-M version was used to simulate runoff generation for each cell. In a snow-free region such as the Dongjiang basin, WASMOD-M had only three parameters: the evaporation parameter a4 , the fastrunoff parameter c1 , and the slow-runoff parameter c2 . In the Willamette basin, two additional snow parameters, a1 and a2 , were used (Xu, 2002). Calibration of model parameters One thousand parameter-value sets were obtained by Latin-Hypercube sampling (McKay et al., 1979) with
Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

prior uniform distribution. Initial parameter-value ranges were set with the same empirical values as reported by Gong et al. (2009) and Xu (2002) for snow parameters. WASMOD-M was run with the same 1000 parametervalue sets and the resulting 1000 runoff-generation time series were saved as input to the routing models. The runoff time series for each of the 1000 simulations were used to calibrate the best wave velocity for both HydroSHEDS- and HYDRO1k-derived NRFs. The Nash and Sutcliffe (1970) efciency was used as objective function. The calibration was done with a range of V45 from 3 to 30 ms 1 in steps of 1 ms 1 . Calibrations were performed for each of the 28 velocities, each one using the same 1000 runoff time series to derive the NRF in order to obtain 1000 model efciencies for both the basins studied. The wave velocity that gave the highest efciency was then chosen for the calibration of runoffgeneration parameters, and the top 2% parameter-value sets were chosen as behavioural (in the Generalised Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE) sense, Beven and Binley, 1992). The calibration was done with local meteorological data for the Dongjiang basin for the period 19821983. Three years preceding the calibration period were used to warm up the model. Monte-Carlo simulations with the same 1000 parameter-value sets were then carried out for 19972002 in the Dongjiang basin and for 19972008 in the Willamette basin with the combined TRMMGPCP precipitation and ERA-interim temperature and dew temperature data as weather input. Potential evaporation was calculated by FAO-56 recommended equations (Allen et al., 1998) from temperature and dew-point temperature data. The top 2% simulation results for response functions derived from HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS were also used in these cases. Computational efciency The computational time was recorded on a Windows XP PC (Intel Pentium 4, 3 GHz CPU, purchased in 2005) for three different tasks for the Willamette River basin using the HydroSHEDS hydrography: (1) the calculation of upstream area through the use of border ows, (2) the computation of time delay for river pixels under a unit V45 velocity, and (3) routing with the aggregated NRF for a 10-year runoff simulation. The rst two tasks represent computationally demanding one-time efforts for all subsequent simulations, whereas the third task represents the computational requirements for an actual simulation.

RESULTS The HydroSHEDS representation of the Dongjiang basin The HydroSHEDS representation of the Dongjiang basin is presented here to show the degree of detail elaborated by the algorithm. The numerical characteristics for the Willamette River basin were similar. The downstream Boluo station of the Dongjiang basin was
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

Figure 3. Pixel upstream areas (logarithmic scale) for downstream cell of the Dongjiang basin: (a) upstream area based on HydroSHEDS, obtained by only considering ow accumulation inside each low-resolution cell, (b) upstream area based on HydroSHEDS, taking into account ow accumulation from all upstream cells, and (c) upstream area of all upstream cells deduced from HYDRO1k. Pixels with less than 1 km2 upstream area are shown in white

registered to the HydroSHEDS pixel (211814, 203809). In this study, 21 upstream cells were identied, each of which partly or fully contributed to the drainage area of the downstream station. The complete upstream area was identied as 25 381 km2 with HydroSHEDS as a basis but as 25 886 km2 with HYDRO1k as a basis (Gong et al., 2009). There were 3 234 541 HydroSHEDS pixels identied upstream of the Boluo station, about 125 times more than the number of pixels identied in HYDRO1k. The 3 234 541 ow paths were constructed to represent the complete ow dynamic, which included transport both at hillslope scale and in river channels. The use of combined local-scale (within cell) and global-scale (between cells) ow paths allowed a great degree of simplication (Figure 2) for the global-scale ow accumulation. Only 12 922 global ow paths, i.e. 04% of the complete number of ow paths, were needed to derive pixel upstream area and time-delay distribution by the continuous updation procedure that added upstream-cell values to downstream cells. The updation started with individual pixel values (Figure 3a) and ended when all upstream pixel areas and time delays had been added to the upstream area (Figure 3b). Figure 3b shows that stream channels retained the same shape at the end of the updation procedure but the upstream area of the main channel was greatly increased by adding all upstream contributions. A comparison with the HYDRO1k upstream area (Figure 3c) showed that only the main stream of the river was correctly represented in HYDRO1k. A considerable loss in local-scale delay information, together with some disagreement in the basin delineation, can be seen. The range of upstream area values, however, remained similar for both HydroSHEDS and HYDRO1k. The resolution of the ow network had a considerable effect on slope. The spatial distribution of pixel slope, as demonstrated in Figure 4, showed large differences when based on HYDRO1k compared with HydroSHEDS data in both the basins studied. The spatial variation pattern agreed but the range differed between the two slope maps. The maximum slope for the Dongjiang basin
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increased from 18 to 50 , and for the Willamette basin from 27 to 57 , when introducing HydroSHEDS instead of HYDRO1k. River-channel identication Time delays (Figure 5a) showed a wide and stable range for upstream areas of less than 100 km2 in the Dongjiang basin. The range of time delays quickly converged towards lower values when TAs were larger than 100 km2 , suggesting a shorter transport time for the major downstream channels. The time-delay distributions showed similar bimodal behaviour for the intervals 0510 and 10100 km2 , with peaks at 10 and 20 days, indicating a similarity in transport times for small tributaries. This could be understood as a compensation effect between slope and distance (Figure 5b). The bimodal trend was visible but less apparent for the 1001000 km2 interval. Stream channels with upstream TAs in the interval 100010 000 km2 showed a uniform response function with a shorter concentration time than that for smaller channels. NRFs with TAs of 05, 10, and 100 km2 values gave similar bimodal distributions, whereas the 1000-km2 threshold value gave a more uniform response (Figure 5c). This meant that TA values between 05 and 100 km2 for river identication gave similar time-delay distributions. The number of river cells for TAs of 05, 10, and 100 km2 were 240 464, 61 248, and 19 413, respectively, for the Dongjiang basin. If the computational cost is a concern, a TA of 100 km2 would give similar result but only require 8% of the computational time compared with a 05-km2 TA. Computational time was not a concern in this work, so we used the 05km2 TA to guarantee that all the local-scale information was extracted from HydroSHEDS. The aggregated NRF The aggregated NRFs showed clear differences when based on HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS (Figure 6). The HYDRO1k-based NRFs had a wider distribution, indicating a slower basin response. This behaviour was the
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

Figure 4. Slopes derived from 1-km HYDRO1k (a, c) and 300 HydroSHEDS pixels (b, d) for the Dongjiang River (a, b) and the Willametter River basins (c, d). Note the different scales

Figure 5. (a) Time delays for each HydroSHEDS pixel having more than 05-km2 area upstream of the Boluo station of the Dongjiang basin, as a function of its upstream area, assuming unit V45 wave velocity. (b) Time-delay distributions for river-channel pixels for four upstream TA intervals: 0510, 10 100, 1001000, and 1000 10 000 km2 . (c) Time-delay distributions for river-channel pixels obtained by assuming TAs of 05, 10, 100, and 1000 km2

same for both Dongjiang and Willamette basins. With a normalized wave velocity, V45 , of 5 m s 1 , the maximum time delays were 37 days for Dongjiang and 15 days for Willamette when HYDRO1k was used but only 7 and 6 days, respectively, when HydroSHEDS was used. Routing performance The top 2% simulation results using NRFs derived from HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS gave the best t during the recession period in early spring of 1982 and during the wetting-up period of 1983 when using HydroSHEDS (Figure 7a,b). A comparison between
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HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS for one randomly picked behavioural discharge time series showed that both routing models underestimated low ows. This might indicate a less efcient algorithm for the runoff generation. HYDRO1k signicantly overestimated high ows, whereas HydroSHEDS showed less bias (Figure 7c). Equinality was found between calibrated snow parameters a1 and a2 , conrming the results of Wid en-Nilsson et al. (2009). The trends and most efcient V45 values differed considerably between HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS (Figure 7d). Calibration against observed discharge
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

Figure 6. Aggregated CRFs at 05 resolution for the Dongjiang River (a, b) and the Willamette River basins (c, d) with a unit wave velocity of V45 D 5 m s 1 . The distribution gives the time taken for runoff generated in a given pixel to reach the reference point, in this case, the down-most discharge station (marked by an open circle). The distributions are derived from HYDRO1k (a, c) and HydroSHEDS (b, d). The maximum time delay is 37 days for the Dongjiang and 15 days for the Willamette basins. The y axes of each cell, scaled 01, show the fraction of arrived discharge on each day

forced HYDRO1k-based routing to very large V45 values with a best value of 26 m s 1 , corresponding to a maximum NashSutcliffe efciency of 085. An opposite trend was observed with HydroSHEDS which showed a well-dened peak around 5 m s 1 with a maximum efciency of 086. The basin-average velocities were 16 m s 1 for HydroSHEDS and 7 m s 1 for HYDRO1k when the optimum V45 values were converted using Equation (2) and the average slopes. The HYDRO1k value was clearly less realistic when compared with other global routing schemes (e.g. Oki et al., 1999; D oll et al., 2003; Gong et al., 2009). Simulations in Dongjiang with global weather data gave lower NashSutcliffe efciency and more scattered discharge simulations than that for the local weather data case (Figures 7a,b and 8a,b). The HYDRO1k routing overestimated high ows. Both HYDRO1k and HydroSHEDS models underestimated low ows and slightly overestimated ows in the range 1000 2000 m3 s 1 (Figure 8c). When local weather data and HydroSHEDS were used (Figure 7c), the simulated ow showed little bias for ow magnitude above 1000 m3 s 1 . This may indicate a bias in the global weather data. Distinctly different wave velocities were also obtained
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when global weather data were used to drive the model (Figure 8d). The HYDRO1k-derived basin velocity again showed an unrealistic optimal value, 30 m s 1 , with an efciency of 076. The HydroSHEDS-derived velocity of 5 m s 1 was the same as when driven by local data. The corresponding maximum efciency was 077 in this case. The advantage of HydroSHEDS was clear for the Willamette basin than for the Dongjiang basin (Figure 9). The steeper topography of the Willamette basin was better represented with HydroSHEDS, reected in the signicant differences of the model efciency (Figure 9d). The sensitivity of the runoff-generation parameters a4 , c1 , and c2 of WASMOD-M was overall moderate with respect to both hydrography and weather input (Figure 10). The difference in probabilitydensity functions for the two hydrographies was small for the fastow (c1 ) and slow-ow (c2 ) parameter values, whereas some deviation was seen for the evaporation parameter (a4 ). The difference was much larger when global weather data was used instead of local. The use of global weather data forced a4 and c1 to large values for both hydrographies. When HYDRO1k was used, the slowow parameter c2 reacted differently to global than to
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

Figure 7. Observed (black line) and modelled discharge (grey lines) in 1982 1983 for the Dongjiang basin at Boluo. Runoff generation is modelled with WASMOD-M with local weather input and routed with NRFs derived from HYDRO1k (a) and HydroSHEDS (b). (c) Quantilequantile plot of observed versus simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares). (d) V45 wave velocity and corresponding best efciency of simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares)

local data, whereas the HydroSHEDS response remained the same. The computational requirements for two preparatory, one-time efforts and for an actual simulation in the Willamette River basin showed order-of-magnitude differences between the two types of calculations. The updation of upstream area took 1 h and 35 min for the 4 717 638 HydroSHEDS pixels of the Willamette basin. The computation of time delay for river pixels under a unit V45 velocity took 35 min. The computation of routing delay for a 10-year simulation took less than 1 s.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS In the study preceding this, Gong et al. (2009) show that storage-based routing algorithms are inherently scaledependent because they rely on ow networks that change with spatial resolution. The inaccuracy of such algorithms tends to increase with cell size, because the assumption of zero convective delay becomes less and less valid as cell size increases. The transfer of high-resolution delay dynamics in the form of NRFs for low-resolution grids is shown by Gong et al. (2009) as one way of achieving accuracy and scale independency in the same
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time. This study was based on the belief that successful application of the method would rely strongly on the quality of the hydrography used to derive the time-delay distribution. We had to develop an efcient algorithm to use HydroSHEDS at its native 300 resolution for global-scale applications. We found it important to demonstrate the added value of using such a high-resolution dataset at a global scale, given all other uncertainties in global waterbalance models. The comparison of routing algorithms based on HYDRO1k (1-km resolution) and HydroSHEDS (90-m resolution at the equator) gave insight into the costs and benets of using hydrographies with different spatial resolutions. The use of HydroSHEDS instead of HYDRO1k to derive NRFs did not signicantly improve overall model efciency when calibrated against observed discharge. The use of the lower resolution HYDRO1k, however, resulted in non-realistically high wave velocity and a positive bias for simulated high ows. The bias for the HYDRO1k-derived wave velocity could be explained by comparing the CRF of the two routing models for the same V45 value of 5 m s 1 (Figure 8). A much larger spread of behavioural models was seen for HYDRO1k compared with HydroSHEDS (Figures 7c, 8c, and 9c).
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

Figure 8. Observed (black line) and modelled discharge (grey lines) for the period 1997 2002 for the Dongjiang River basin at Boluo. Runoff generation is modelled with WASMOD-M with precipitation input from a combined TRMMGPCD dataset and routed with NRFs derived from HYDRO1k (a) and HydroSHEDS (b). (c) Quantilequantile plot of observed versus simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares). (d) V45 wave velocity and corresponding best efciency of simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares)

The scaling of ow-path length when using hydrographies with different spatial resolutions may be reected in the network meandering factor. This was found to take a small value of 12 for the Dongjiang basin (Gong et al., 2009) when based on HYDRO1k or 14 globally when based on total runoff integrating pathways (Oki et al., 1999). The signicant delay for HYDRO1k indicated that the lower resolution of HYDRO1k led to a decrease in derived slope resulting in longer travel times which was not compensated by the decrease in ow path. The underestimation of slope was likely the main reason for the unrealistically large V45 value obtained for HYDRO1kbased algorithm. The good basin-area agreement between both hydrographies came from our explicit accounting of sub-cell area. Other algorithms commonly use the whole area of a cell. The STN-30p network, e.g. only identies ten 05 05 cells for the Dongjiang basin upstream of Boluo compared with 21 in this study. The comparison between local precipitation data and the combined TRMMGPCP data showed that the routing performance was much more sensitive to the quality of precipitation input than to the choice of spatial resolution in the hydrography. Both input-data errors
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and routing-parameterization errors inuenced the distribution of behavioural parameter values. This can be a problem in a global water-balance model because its parameters must be extrapolated spatially into ungauged areas and temporally into the future for water-resource predictions and assessments. The sensitivity study of the runoff-generation parameters showed that they were more sensitive to the quality of input precipitation data than to the hydrography. However, a good routing algorithm is always crucial. For example, Gong et al. (2009) show that if a linear reservoir-routing algorithm is used for the Dongjiang basin, a maximum NashSutcliffe efciency of only 075 can be achieved at 05 resolution even with high-quality local precipitation input. This is as poor as the result obtained with the biased TRMMGPCP data in this study. Our result indicated that the biased wave velocity for HYDRO1k was caused by the reduction in slope at 1-km resolution. A bias correction for the HYDRO1k slope dataset, e.g. through the use of the downscaling algorithm by Pradhan et al. (2006), might improve the results for large-scale applications, while at the same time improving the quality of a slope-related product such as the
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GLOBAL-SCALE RIVER ROUTING WITH HydroSHEDS

Figure 9. Observed (black line) and modelled discharge (grey lines) for the period 1997 2008 for the Willamette River basin. Runoff generation is modelled with WASMOD-M with precipitation input from a combined TRMMGPCD dataset and routed with NRFs derived from HYDRO1k (a) and HydroSHEDS (b). (c) Quantilequantile plot of observed versus simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares). (d) V45 wave velocity and corresponding best efciency of simulated discharge using HYDRO1k (lled dots) and HydroSHEDS (open squares)

Figure 10. Posterior cumulative distribution functions, F x , of the WASMOD-M parameters a4 , c1 , and c2 under different weather and hydrographic inputs: global weather data and HYDRO1k (dashed grey); local high-quality weather data and HYDRO1k (dashed black); global weather data and HydroSHEDS (solid grey); and local high-quality weather data and HydroSHEDS (solid black)

topographic index. However, there are more advantages that are only offered by HydroSHEDS. For example, the high-resolution, hydrologically conditioned DEM offered by HydroSHEDS meets the resolution requirement to implement TOPMODEL at a local-basin scale (e.g. Quinn et al., 1995). Ongoing work by the authors has successfully used topography-derived storage-capacity
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distributions to formulate a runoff-generation algorithm at the global scale. This algorithm also uses HydroSHEDS data and will be coupled to the routing algorithm in this study. The HydroSHEDS dataset offers the possibility of identifying individual river-channel pixels. This possibility has several implications for the modelling of routing
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L. GONG, S. HALLDIN AND C.-Y. XU

and runoff generation. We have shown in this paper that the NRF, constructed for river channels, remains almost unchanged when TAs vary in the 05100 km2 range. Although many more river-channel pixels were identied at the higher resolution, the network topologies remained similar. This feature can allow a simplication of the algorithm because the routing quality is not signicantly lowered when using a large TA, i.e. when performing routing only on major river channels. For runoff generation, however, model performance is most likely more sensitive to the selected TA specied for river-channel identication (e.g. Quinn et al., 1995). The HydroSHEDS dataset has a potential to allow separation of overlandow delay and channel delay, which must be lumped when HYDRO1k is used. The explicit identication of river pixels can also simplify the registration of dams and reservoirs into the river network and their incorporation into a routing model. More accurate basin delineation and the high-resolution ow-path structure may make it easier to compare and validate global hydrological models against regional models. Computational efciency is of central importance for any kind of global model. We addressed the efciency problem by separating the total amount of calculation into two stages: the preparation stage and the simulation stage. The new algorithm allows the most computationintensive tasks, resulting in the NRF for the given area and spatial resolution, to be accomplished in the preparation stage, which is a one-time effort. Routing during the simulation stage is done by the convolution of runoff into the NRFs. The computational demand at this stage is four to ve orders of magnitude smaller than that during the preparation stage. The convolution algorithm is fast enough to allow calibration techniques based on Monte-Carlo methods on the global scale. The two-stage computational strategy separates not only heavy from light computation but also the ne-scale data dependency at the simulation stage. Once the NRF is constructed for global cells, it can easily be coupled to runoff-generation output from any other global or regional water-balance model. The short temporal coverage of high-quality daily global climate data limits the application of global hydrological models. The mismatch between temporal coverage of precipitation and discharge data introduces another challenge. For instance, TRMM, one of the most homogeneous global precipitation datasets, covers only the last decade. This period coincides with a trend of reduced number of discharge-gauging stations and increased degree of river regulation. Therefore, we believe that it is a large challenge to evaluate the new routing algorithm in a large spatial and temporal domain, as compared with local evaluation in this study. Further studies are being prepared to evaluate the new NRF algorithm and the HydroSHEDS dataset at a continental scale. Because reliable global daily precipitation data are only available for the last decade, future work will also aim at developing a new calibration technique to
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condition model parameters from statistical characteristics of previous discharge time series. This new technique will have a potential to be used when recent discharge data are not available or are inuenced by regulation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was funded by the Swedish Research Council Grants 629-2002-287 and 621-2002-4352, Grant 214-2005-911 from the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, Grant SWE-2005-296 from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency Department for Research Cooperation, SAREC, and Grant CUHK4627/ 05H from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong. Parts of the computations were performed on UPPMAX resources under Project p2006015. We are grateful to Prof. Yongqin David Chen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for providing the hydrological data for the Dongjiang basin.

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