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For hydrological modeling in snow-free catchments, precipitation (P) and potential evapotranspiration (E pot) are the two key input time series. There are different methods to observe, calculate and interpolate these time series. In the Australian large sample data set for hydrological modeling (CAMELS-AUS, Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-sample Studies) with data for 222 catchments, two different time series for P and seven different time series for E pot are provided. Here, we address the open question of which data should be used as input to an hydrological model.

Our basic assumption is that the most suitable combination of P and E pot is the one that results in the best model performances in terms of runoff simulations. For this we first tested the differences between the different input time series. Secondly, we conducted a thorough comparison of the 14 possible combinations of P and E pot time …