DEVELOPMENT OF A DISTRIBUTED HYDROLOGICAL MODEL FOR THE COELLO RIVER BASIN IN COLOMBIA

The Coello river basin has been studied in the past with conceptual models that show the high importance of the spatial representation for water availability and contamination in the central region of Colombia. The state-of-the-art modelling software comprise a large gamma of open source and commercial software. However, still spatial distributed systems are limited in their application and their flexibility to represent regional interactions. For this purpose and to be able to analyze the Coello river basin, this work uses the concept of the distributed Tracer-Aided Catchment model (TAC^D). The concept of Tracer aid (TAC) uses a gridded system that comprises upper zones that can be homogenous and groundwater systems that have interactions. This was an important component due to the future research in the mining industry in the region. For now, the adaptation from an old format in a PCRASTER library has been updated to the latest Python. This updated version will be referred as TAC^D2. To evaluate the distributed hydrological modelling tool a model for the Coello was build. The model parameters were calibrated to minimize the Nash-Sutcliffe error between observed and estimated flow data. However, water balance and the RMSE were evaluated. The distributed model allowed us to identify the hydrological sectorization of processes. The basin shows that the high region represents almost half of the flow that arrives to the Payandé station. Moreover, topographic variability of the basin might increase its vulnerability to extreme events.