Calibrating environment Canada's MESH modelling system over the Great Lakes Basin

This paper reports on recent progress towards improved predictions of a land surface-hydrological modelling system, Modélisation Environmentale-Surface et Hydrologie (MESH), via its calibration over the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin. Accordingly, a "global" calibration strategy is utilized in which parameters for all land class types are calibrated simultaneously to a number of sub-basins and then validated in time and space. Model performance was evaluated based on four performance metrics, including the Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) coefficient and simulated compared with observed hydrographs. Results from two calibration approaches indicate that in the model validation mode, the global strategy generates better results than an alternative calibration strategy, referred to as the "individual" strategy, in which parameters are calibrated individually to a single sub-basin with a dominant land type and then validated in a different sub-basin with the same dominant land type. The global calibration strategy was relatively successful despite the large number of calibration parameters (51) and relatively small number of model evaluations (1000) used in the automatic calibration procedure. The NS values for spatial validation range from 0.10 to 0.72 with a median of 0.41 for the 15 sub-basins considered. Results also confirm that a careful model calibration and validation is needed before any application of the model.