• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.51 no.8
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• pp.677-686
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• 2018

There remain numerous ungauged watersheds in Korea owing to limited spatial and temporal streamflow data with which to estimate hydrological model parameters. To deal with this problem, various regionalization approaches have been proposed over the last several decades. However, the results of the regionalization models differ according to climatic conditions and regional physical characteristics, and the results of the regionalization models in previous studies are generally inconclusive. Thus, to improve the performance of the regionalization methods, this study attaches hydrological model parameters obtained using a spatial proximity model to the explanatory variables of a regional regression model and defines it as a hybrid regionalization model (hybrid model). The performance results of the hybrid model are compared with those of existing methods for 37 test watersheds in South Korea. The GR4J model parameters in the gauged watersheds are estimated using a shuffled complex evolution algorithm. The variation inflation factor is used to consider the multicollinearity of watershed characteristics, and then stepwise regression is performed to select the optimum explanatory variables for the regression model. Analysis of the results reveals that the highest modeling accuracy is achieved using the hybrid model on RMSE overall the test watersheds. Consequently, it can be concluded that the hybrid model can be used as an alternative approach for modeling ungauged watersheds.