Incremental distributed modelling investigation in a small agricultural catchment: 1. Overland flow with comparison with the unit hydrograph model

A distributed overland flow model is presented and the test results compared with those of the unit hydrograph (UH) model. Infiltration excess in the overland model was calculated using both a modified Green and Ampt (G–A) method and a more complicated method that keeps track of the soil moisture content. The two‐dimensional partial differential flow equations with kinematic flow approximation were solved using both backward‐central explicit and implicit finite‐difference schemes. Moreover, a baseflow component was added to the flow model. Each part of the model was built by replacing a process by a parallel process or by adding a completely new component. When the model was developed and validated in small agricultural fields in southern Finland, comparisons were made between corresponding processes and the significance of added components were estimated in order to find out whether increased model complexity improves the model performance. Apart from the basic model, all the other distributed models outperformed the UH approach. The implicit scheme was clearly more accurate than the explicit scheme, and the baseflow component improved the results significantly. There was no major difference between the performances of the infiltration models, but the G–A method was more stable and much faster. The approaches that were best in the calibration were also the best in the verification. The full distributed model provides a potential method for running water‐quality models and testing their different processes. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.