Impact of climate seasonality on catchment yield: A parameterization for commonly-used water balance formulas

This paper examines the hydrological impact of the seasonality of precipitation and maximum evaporation: seasonality is, after aridity, a second-order determinant of catchment water yield. Based on a data set of 171 French catchments (where aridity ranged between 0.2 and 1.2), we present a parameterization of three commonly-used water balance formulas (namely, Turc-Mezentsev, Tixeront-Fu and Oldekop formulas) to account for seasonality effects. We quantify the improvement of seasonality-based parameterization in terms of the reconstitution of both catchment streamflow and water yield. The significant improvement obtained (reduction of RMSE between 9 and 14% depending on the formula) demonstrates the importance of climate seasonality in the determination of long-term catchment water balance.