Effects of Finer Scale Soil Survey and Land-Use Classification on SWAT Hydrological Modelling Accuracy in Data-Poor Study Areas

Abstract

The limited availability of high-quality spatial data often limits the develop-ment of hydrological modelling in developing countries. Hydrological models with data at different scales may generate large uncertainties in modelling outputs. This study analysed the accuracy of four SWAT built models that combine soil and land use/land cover (LULC) data at the scale of 1:250,000 and 1:100,000 in a basin of Mexico. SWAT model allowed determining that large-scale maps produced better results than data from small-scale. Sensitiv-ity analysis with different soil data was less than LULC data. However, the small-scale can be used for exploratory purposes when testing SWAT per-formance.