S. Gharari

and 7 more

Lakes and reservoirs are an integral part of the terrestrial water cycle. In this work, we present the implementation of water balance models of lakes and reservoirs into mizuRoute, a vector-based routing model. The developments described here are termed mizuRoute-Lakes. The capabilities of mizuRoute-Lake in simulating the water balance of lakes and reservoirs are demonstrated. The main advantage of mizuRoute-Lake is flexibility in testing alternative lake water balance models within a given river and lake network topology. Users can choose between various types of parametric models that are already implemented in mizuRoute-Lake or data-driven models that provide time-series of the target volume and abstraction from a lake or reservoir from an external source such as historic observation or water management models. The parametric models for lake and reservoir water balance implemented in mizuRoute-Lake are Hanasaki, HYPE, and D{\"o}ll formulations. In general, the parametric models relate the outflow from lakes or reservoirs to the storage and various parameters including inflow, demand, volume of storage, etc. Additionally, this flexibility allows to easily evaluate and compare the effect of various water balance models for a lake or reservoir without needing to reconfigure the routing model. We show the flexibility of mizuRoute-Lake by presenting global, regional and local scale applications. The development of mizuRoute-Lake paves the way for better integration of water management models with existing and future observations such as the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, in the context of Earth system modeling.