EvalHyd v0.1.2: a polyglot tool for the evaluation of deterministic and probabilistic streamflow predictions

Abstract

The evaluation of streamflow predictions forms an essential part of most hydrological modelling studies published in the literature. The evaluation process typically involves the computation of some evaluation metrics, but it can also involve the preliminary processing of the predictions as well as the subsequent processing of the computed metrics. In order for published hydrological studies to be reproducible, these steps need to be carefully documented by the authors. The availability of a single tool performing all of these tasks would simplify not only the documentation by the authors but also the reproducibility by the readers. However, this requires such a tool to be polyglot (i.e. usable in a variety of programming languages) and openly accessible so that it can be used by everyone in the hydrological community. To this end, we developed a new tool named evalhyd that offers metrics and functionalities for the evaluation of deterministic and probabilistic streamflow predictions. It is open source, and it can be used in Python, in R, in C++, or as a command line tool. This article describes the tool and illustrates its functionalities using Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) reforecasts over France as an example data set.