Application of SLURP hydrological model to a sub-arctic basin

The SLURP model developed at NHRI, is a distributed conceptual model which simulates the behaviour of a watershed by carrying out vertical water balances for each element of a matrix of land covers and subareas of a watershed and then routing the resulting runoff between subareas. The model is able to simulate snowpack accumulation and depletion, groundwater response of watersheds, and rainfall and snowmelt generated streamflow. This study describes an approach of applying the SLURP hydrological model to a mountainous sub-arctic streamflow of Wolf Creek Basin. In this sub-arctic region, annual peak flow is generally dominated by snowmelt. As a research basin, the Wolf Creek basin has been equipped with instruments to measure the snow depth and density. A procedure to convert snow data time series into winter precipitation required by SLURP is developed. The generated winter precipitation data, together with other related climate data from three meteorological stations within the basin were used for both model calibration and model verification. Two years of streamflow data were tested with good results obtained for the calibration period 1994-1995 and somewhat lesser for the verification period 1995-1996.