Hydroclimatological Modeling of the Carcarañá River Basin in Argentina

The Carcarañá river basin in Argentina stretches from the Sierras de Cordoba at the foothills of the Andes Mountains to eastern Argentina and is frequently impacted by severe, organized convection. The physical processes and land-atmosphere exchanges of moisture and energy are crucial in this region where organized mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) contribute to extreme precipitation causing severe weather, flash floods and riverine floods. Despite the societal and economic impacts of MCS in the region, few stream gauging and other hydrologic stations are available in the catchment. This work explores the existing observations of precipitation, water table depth, , and streamflow to provide a long-term water budget of the basin. The community WRF-Hydro modeling system is applied as an uncoupled (i.e. driven by observed meteorological forcings), distributed hydrologic model over the basin to simulate the region’s hydroclimate over the period 1998-2014. A calibration and validation process is performed to understand the effect of land use on the partitioning of rainfall between infiltration and runoff. This modeling system provides a reliable tool to simulate critical MCS-generated high streamflow events when with high-resolution satellite precipitation products like the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), and the Global Land Data Assimilation Systems (GLDAS). Most sensitive parameters of the model are to be manually calibrated with respect to observed streamflow amount and timing. The developed modeling platform is an important step towards an improved understanding and, eventually, forecasting of the hydrologic impacts of extreme precipitation events in the region.