Abstract
Conceptual hydrological models, sometimes also called gray-box models, are precipitation-runoff models built based on observed or assumed empirical relationships among different hydrological variables. They are different from black-box models which consider precipitation-runoff relationship only statistically. They are also different from the physically based distributed hydrological models which are based on solving differential equations describing the physical laws of mass, energy, and momentum conservations. This chapter describes how conceptual hydrological models represent the different hydrological processes involved in converting precipitation to runoff over land, and then to streamflow discharge at the basin outlet, including precipitation, snow accumulation and ablation, infiltration, soil moisture storage, evapotranspiration, runoff generation, baseflow, and river routing. Some of the well-known models are also used for illustration.
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Liu, Z., Wang, Y., Xu, Z., Duan, Q. (2019). Conceptual Hydrological Models. In: Duan, Q., Pappenberger, F., Wood, A., Cloke, H., Schaake, J. (eds) Handbook of Hydrometeorological Ensemble Forecasting. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39925-1_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39925-1_22
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