Assessing Integrated Hydrologic Model: From Benchmarking to Case Study in a Typical Arid and Semi-Arid Basin

Groundwater-surface water interactions play a crucial role in hydrologic cycles, especially in arid and semi-arid basins. There is a growing interest in developing integrated hydrologic models to describe groundwater-surface water interactions and the associated processes. In this study, an integrated process-based hydrologic model, ParFlow, was tested and utilized to quantify the hydrologic responses, such as changes in surface runoff and surface/subsurface storage. We progressively conducted a complexity-increasing series of benchmarking cases to assess the performance of ParFlow in simulating overland flow and integrated groundwater-surface water exchange. Meanwhile, the overall performance and the computational efficiency were quantitatively assessed using modified Taylor diagrams. Based on the benchmarking cases, two case studies in the Heihe River Basin were performed for further validation and to diagnose the hydrologic responses under disturbance, named the Bajajihu (BJH) and Dayekou (DYK) cases, respectively. Both cases were 2D transects configured with in-situ measurements in the mid- and downstream of the Heihe River Basin. In the BJH case, simulated soil moisture by ParFlow was shown to be comparable with in-situ observations in general, with Pearson’s correlation coefficient (R) > 0.93 and root mean square difference (RMSD) < 0.007. In the DYK case, seven scenarios driven by remote sensing and reanalysis data were utilized to study hydrological responses influenced by natural physical processes (i.e., precipitation) and groundwater exploitations (i.e., pumping) that are critical to surface and subsurface storage. Results show that subsurface storage is sensitive to groundwater exploitation before an obvious stationary point. Moreover, a correlation analysis was additionally provided demonstrating the impacts of different factors on subsurface storage timeseries. It was found that pumping influences subsurface storage remarkably, especially under short-term but large-volume pumping rates. The study is expected to provide a powerful tool and insightful guidance in understanding hydrological processes’ effects in arid and semi-arid basins.