Calibrating hourly rainfall-runoff models with daily forcings for streamflow forecasting applications in meso-scale catchments

Simple disaggregation of daily rainfall produces hourly streamflow models that perform almost as well as those developed from hourly rainfall data. Rainfall disaggregation performs at least as well as parameter scaling, and often better. For the catchments and models we test, simple disaggregation is a very straightforward and effective way to establish hydrological models for continuous sub-daily streamflow forecasting systems when sub-daily rainfall data are unavailable.