Storage cascade vs. MODFLOW for the modelling of groundwater flow in the context of the calibration of a hydrological model in the Ammer catchment

Abstract. Hydrological models are the decisive tools to evaluate the effect of global change upon the water cycle. But the applied hydrological models have to be a trade-off between their degree of complexity and manageable structures and data requirements. This paper compares the advantages and disadvantages of integrating a spatially-distributed process-based groundwater flow model in the context of the calibration of a catchment runoff concentration model. The multi-objective optimisation and the GLUE method are used to analyse the performance and the parameter identifiability of both model structures.