Different Infiltration Methods for Swat Model Seasonal Calibration of Flow and Sediment Production

Hydrosedimentological models make it possible to better understand the dynamics of water and sediment production in watersheds when properly calibrated. The objective of this study was to analyze the effects of the curve number (CN) and Green and Ampt (GA) methods and of seasonal calibration of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model for estimating flow and sediment production in an agricultural basin. In this research, we presented an original application with the hourly suspended sediment concentration (SSC) generated by artificial neural networks (ANNs) for use in SWAT model calibration. This method was applied in the Taboão basin (77.5 km 2 ), with data from 2008 to 2018. The best Nash–Sutcliffe (NS) coefficient values were obtained using the combination of wet years for calibration and the GA method for both daily flow (NScalibration: 0.74; and NSvalidation: 0.68) and daily sediment production (NScalibration: 0.83; and NSvalidation: 0.77). The CN method did not result in satisfactory values during daily flow calibration (NScalibration 0.39). The results showed that it is possible to employ the SWAT model for hydrosedimentological prediction in the Taboão basin, with a favorable efficiency, using the GA method and calibration with data for wet periods.