Use of abstraction and discharge data to improve the performance of a national‐scale hydrological model

Across the UK, water abstracted from ground, surface, and tidal stores is regulated through a system of licenses to protect both the sources and the environment. Similar permits are required for discharging wastewater to rivers or onto the ground. These abstractions and discharges can have a significant impact on UK Rivers, but measurements are not readily available, which discourages their use in hydrological models of river flows. However, these very unique data sets provide a means to improve the performance of spatially distributed hydrological models, particularly during periods when abstraction regulations change and at ungauged river locations. To demonstrate this, point source abstraction and discharge measurements across England have been transformed into 1 × 1 km resolution gridded data and used with an enhanced formulation of the Grid-to-Grid (G2G) hydrological model where these processes are mathematically represented. A comparison of G2G-simulated and gauged river flows for 605 catchments across England between 1999 and 2014 indicates that model simulation of river flows is generally improved at gauged locations downstream of abstraction/discharge sites. The main improvement is in the simulation of low flows, for which the median performance is improved by 10.7%, however, the impact on simulation of high river flows is more modest (1.5% improvement). These results demonstrate the potential gains available to the international hydrological and land-surface modeling community from using records of actual water use (where available) in models, in place of more widely used national statistics.