Out of 29 subbasins, 24 subbasins had fractions of area in multiple elevation bands, and the remaining five subbasins’ areas were in a single elevation band. The observed precipitation and weather data (temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed) were processed for the period 1988–2004. The year 2002 was excluded due to missing records in the GSOD precipitation. The period

MDV3100 ic50 1988–1997 was used to calibrate the model, and 1998–2004 (excluding 2002) was used to validate the model. The first 2 years for each simulation were used for model spin-up time, which were, as well as the missing data year of 2002, excluded from subsequent analyses. We calibrated the SWAT model at the basin level using observed river discharge at the Bahadurabad discharge station. Before running the calibration, we analyzed the sensitivity of the parameters by using the Latin hypercube one-factor-at-a-time (LH-OAT) method of SWAT (van Griensven et al., 2006). This approach combines the advantages of global and local sensitivity analysis methods and can efficiently provide a rank ordering of parameter importance (Sun and Ren, 2013). Based on sensitivity, the top-ranked 10 sensitive parameters (Table 1) were optimized

using the SUFI2 algorithm in the SWAT-CUP. In SUFI2 all uncertainties such as model input, model conceptualization, model parameters, and measured data are mapped onto the parameter ranges as the procedure tries to capture most of the measured PtdIns(3,4)P2 data within the 95% prediction uncertainty (Abbaspour et al., 2009). Overall uncertainty in the output is quantified by the 95% prediction learn more uncertainty (95PPU) calculated at the 2.5% and 97.5% levels of the cumulative distribution of an output variable obtained through Latin hypercube sampling. The goodness of calibration/uncertainty performance is quantified by P-factor, which is the percentage of data bracketed by the 95PPU band, and R-factor, which

is the average width of the band divided by the standard deviation of the corresponding measured variable. Thus, SUFI2 seeks to bracket most of the measured data within the smallest possible uncertainty band ( Abbaspour, 2007). During calibration, our target was to bracket most of the measured data including uncertainties within the 95PPU band, a P-factor close to 1, while having the narrowest band, an R-factor close to zero. The other indices of performance available in SWAT-CUP, including the coefficient of determination (R2), Nash–Sutcliffe (NS) ( Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970), and br2 (R2 times the slope), were also considered when assessing the goodness of fit between the observation and the best simulation. The calibrated model was run for the period 1998–2004 for validation by keeping the optimized parameters constant and allowing only the observed precipitation to vary.