To what extent does river routing matter in hydrological modeling?

Nevertheless, the development of such schemes has been somehow disconnected from hydrologic model calibration research, although both seek to achieve more realistic streamflow simulations. In this paper, we seek to bridge this gap to understand the extent to which the configuration of routing schemes affects hydrologic model parameter searches in water resources applications.

To this end, we configure the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model coupled with the mizuRoute routing model in the Cautin River basin (2770 km 2 ), Chile. We use the Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) method to generate 3500 different model parameters sets, for which basin-averaged runoff estimates are obtained directly (no routing or instantaneous runoff case) and are subsequently compared against outputs from four routing schemes (unit hydrograph, Lagrangian kinematic wave, Muskingum-Cunge, and diffusive wave) applied with five different routing time steps (1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 h).