Evaluation of the era-interim reanalysis data for flow simulation in the Lo river basin at Ghenh Ga station

Abstract

Rainfalland other meteorological dataare essentialfor water resources applications, especially hydrological
simulations. However, in many regions,these data are not available or eccessible which results in a major
challenge for hydrologists.. Therefore, this paper assesses the use ofERA-Interim dataset in order to address
the inadequate meteorologial data problemsin hydrological simulations..The assessment is applied to the Lo
river basin in which the observed meteorological data in its upper river system (occupying by 55% of its
total basin area) cannot be accessed becauseit originates outside the Vietnam territory. The hydrological
SWAT model is used for runoff simulations from 4 different input datasets including: only observed data,
only reanalysis ERA-Interim data, a combination of observed and reanalysis data, a combination of
observed and bias corrected reanalysis data.. The result shows that the combination of observed and bias
corrected reanalysis datasets could improve the quality of runoff simulation for the Lo river basin.
Keywords: Reanalysis, Era-Interim, flow simulation, Lo river basin