Understanding and interpretation of catchment behaviour with a top down approach. Further development of flexible modul structures for hypothesis testing

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Understanding large scale hydrological behaviour remains an unresolved challenge of contemporary hydrology. Several avenues to address this problem have been proposed, which can be broadly classified in the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches. Both approaches face important challenges and limitations, and it is increasingly recognized that their simultaneous use makes a significant impact on better understanding hydrological processes. This project relates to the ‘Research Unit’ and the other ‘Work Packages’ as it addresses common research questions following a ‘top-down’ approach, while the approach adopted by the other sub-projects is mainly ‘bottom-up’. The ‘top-down’ approach is a systematic framework to learning from data, which relies on the testing of hypotheses at every step of analysis. Acknowledging the limitations of current approaches for model development and testing, we propose flexible model approaches as an instrument for incisive hypothesis testing. The main objectives of this project are (i) to extend the capabilities of current flexible frameworks, and (ii) to use flexible frameworks for a systematic investigation of catchment behaviour. We propose a flexible model approach based on generic elements which provide finer granularity and larger flexibility than existing flexible frameworks. This framework is applied to different case studies to investigate (i) the relation between fieldwork-based representation of the landscape in hydrological response units and the overall catchment response, and (ii) the estimation of mean residence time and its relation to catchment properties.