Development of a knowledge library for automated watershed modeling

•We present a new approach to automated watershed modeling that uses a combination of theoretical and data driven modeling.•We developed a watershed modeling library, compliant with the equation discovery tool ProBMoT.•We applied the proposed modeling methodology to the Ribeira da Foupana catchment to extract viable hydrological models.

In this work, we develop a library of components for building semi-distributed watershed models. The library incorporates basic modeling knowledge that allows us to adequately model different water fluxes and nutrient loadings on a watershed scale. It is written in a formalism compliant with the equation discovery tool ProBMoT, which can automatically construct watershed models from the components in the library, given a conceptual model specification and measured data. We apply the proposed modeling methodology to the Ribeira da Foupana catchment to extract a set of viable hydrological models. By specifying the conceptual model and using the knowledge library, two different hydrological models are generated. Both models are automatically calibrated against measurements and the model with the lower root mean squared error (RMSE) value is selected as an appropriate hydrological model for the selected study area.