Hydrology and Earth System Sciences www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net 1027-5606 1607-7938 13 10 2009 10.5194/hess-13-1921-2009 http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/13/1921/2009/ http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/13/1921/2009/hess-13-1921-2009.html http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/13/1921/2009/hess-13-1921-2009.pdf 1921 1936 2009-10-19 Hydrological model performance and parameter estimation in the wavelet-domain B. Schaefli b.schaefli@tudelft.nl E. Zehe Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Water Resources Section, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Institute of Water and Environment, Dept. for Hydrology and River Basins Management, Technische Uni. München, Germany This paper proposes a method for rainfall-runoff model calibration and performance analysis in the wavelet-domain by fitting the estimated wavelet-power spectrum (a representation of the time-varying frequency content of a time series) of a simulated discharge series to the one of the corresponding observed time series. As discussed in this paper, calibrating hydrological models so as to reproduce the time-varying frequency content of the observed signal can lead to different results than parameter estimation in the time-domain. Therefore, wavelet-domain parameter estimation has the potential to give new insights into model performance and to reveal model structural deficiencies. We apply the proposed method to synthetic case studies and a real-world discharge modeling case study and discuss how model diagnosis can benefit from an analysis in the wavelet-domain. 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