Knowledge of hydrological processes and water balance elements are important for climate adaptive water management as well as for introducing mitigation measures aiming to improve surface water quality. Mathematical models have the potential to estimate changes in hydrological processes under changing climatic or land use conditions. These models, indeed, need careful calibration and testing before being applied in decision making. The aim of this study was to compare the capability of five different hydrological models to predict the runoff and the soil water balance elements of a small catchment in Norway. The models were harmonised and calibrated against the same data set. In overall, a good agreement between the measured and simulated runoff was obtained for the different models when integrating the results over a week or longer periods. Model simulations indicate that forest appears to be very important for the water balance in the catchment, and that there is a lack of information on land use specific water balance elements. We concluded that joint application of hydrological models serves as a good background for ensemble modelling of water transport processes within a catchment and can highlight the uncertainty of models forecast.
River runoff and sediment transport are two related random hydrologic variables. The traditional statistical analysis method usually requires those two variables to be linearly correlated, and also have an identical marginal distribution. Therefore, it is difficult to know exactly the characteristics of the runoff and sediment in reality. For this reason, copulas are applied to construct the joint probability distribution of runoff and sediment in this article. The risk of synchronous-asynchronous encounter probability of annual rich-poor runoff and sediment is also studied. At last, the characteristics of annual runoff and sediment with multi-time scales in its joint probability distribution space are simulated by empirical mode decomposition method. The results show that the copula function can simulate the joint probability distribution of runoff and sediment of Huaxia hydrological station in Weihe River well, and that such joint probability distribution has very complex change characteristics at time scales.