Moschini et al. (2026) Hydrological auditing of LISFLOOD v4.1.1: impacts of model setup on water balance components in the Po River Basin

Identification

• Journal: Geoscientific model development
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-08-24
• Authors: Francesca Moschini, Andrea Ficchì, Alberto Pistocchi
• DOI: 10.5194/gmd-19-7855-2026

Research Groups

• European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC)
• Rey Juan Carlos University
• Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano

Short Summary

This study presents a hydrological auditing of the LISFLOOD v4.1.1 model in the Po River Basin, evaluating its performance in simulating streamflow, evapotranspiration, and overall water balance under different model setups. The results show that the current EFAS v.5.0 setup performs best in terms of streamflow simulation but tends to underestimate evapotranspiration.

Objective

• Evaluate the performance of LISFLOOD v4.1.1 in simulating hydrological variables relevant to decision making, including streamflow, evapotranspiration, and water balance components.
• Investigate the impact of model setup on the representation of internal fluxes and processes in large-scale models.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: European continent at a spatial resolution of about 1′ (∼1.5 km) and a temporal resolution of 6 hours.
• Temporal Scale: Daily, monthly, and yearly time steps.

Methodology and Data

• Models used: LISFLOOD v4.1.1
• Data sources: Streamflow observations from 60 gauging stations in the Po River Basin, gridded time series of weather forcings from the EMO-1 dataset.

Main Results

• The current EFAS v.5.0 setup performs best in terms of streamflow simulation but tends to underestimate evapotranspiration.
• Excluding preferential flow and using different soil depth configurations significantly affects the model's ability to quantify hydrological variables relevant to decision making.

Contributions

• This study highlights the importance of evaluating model performance and auditing alternative parametrizations to ensure accurate simulations of water balance components.
• The proposed diagnostic criteria can support the evaluation of physically based distributed models across different applications, while preserving consistency in the representation of long-term water-balance components.

Funding

• European Commission's Horizon 2020 program (grant number: [insert grant number])
• Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (MIUR) (grant number: [insert grant number])

Citation

@article{Moschini2026Hydrological,
  author = {Moschini, Francesca and Ficchì, Andrea and Pistocchi, Alberto},
  title = {Hydrological auditing of LISFLOOD v4.1.1: impacts of model setup on water balance components in the Po River Basin},
  journal = {Geoscientific model development},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5194/gmd-19-7855-2026},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-19-7855-2026}
}