A joined multi-metric calibration of river discharge and nitrate loads with different performance measures

•Joined and simultaneous calibration of discharge and nitrate loads.•Five-segment-based calibration with flow and nitrate duration curves.•Evaluation with statistical and signature measures for discharge and nitrate loads.•Calibration of all magnitudes of discharge and nitrate loads and their dynamics. Hydrological models are useful tools to investigate hydrology and water quality in catchments. The calibration of these models is a crucial step to adapt the model to the catchment conditions, allowing effective simulations of environmental processes. In the model calibration, different performance measures need to be considered to represent different hydrology and water quality conditions in combination. This study presents a joined multi-metric calibration of discharge and nitrate loads simulated with the ecohydrological model SWAT. For this purpose, a calibration approach based on flow duration curves (FDC) is advanced by also considering nitrate duration curves (NDC). Five segments of FDCs and of NDCs are evaluated separately to consider the different phases of hydrograph and nitrograph. To consider both magnitude and dynamics in river discharge and nitrate loads, the Kling–Gupta Efficiency (KGE) is used additionally as a statistical performance metric to achieve a joined multi-variable calibration. The results show that a separate assessment of five different magnitudes improves the calibrated nitrate loads. Subsequently, adequate model runs with good performance for different hydrological conditions both for discharge and nitrate are detected in a joined approach based on FDC, NDC, and KGE. In that manner, plausible results were obtained for discharge and nitrate loads in the same model run. Using a multi-metric performance approach, the simultaneous multi-variable calibration led to a balanced model result for all magnitudes of discharge and nitrate loads.