Calibration and validation of a distributed watershed hydrolic model

Assessing the hydrologic behaviour of a watershed is an important pre-requisite for land and water management. For the abstraction of hydrologic behavior of awatershed, physically based distributed simulation models often needed. Literature on the use of such models is scanty in India and particularly in the state of Kerala. Hence, an attempt has been made to apply the SWAT model, a leading physically based distributed model, toone of the important river basins of Keraia. The model has been calibrated and validated for seven years period from 1996 to 2002 using the daily rainfall and river flow data. The results indicate that the predictive power of the model for both flow and sediment is very high as shown by the time series and Nash Sutcliff efficiency and coefficient of determination.