Abstract
Nowadays, hydrological modeling is widely used both in the scientific and practical studies of mountain river basins. The purpose of this study is to review the developed and adapted hydrological models in Central Asian countries. The models have different methodological approaches and peculiarities in data requirements, which the authors describe in more detail in the paper. Model calibration and testing results are given for mountain rivers located in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. For the high-mountain river basins with small river basin areas (in our study, the average catchment elevation is 2,652-4,170 m.a.s.l. and river basin area starts from 6.6 to 13.7 thousand km2) and availability of the representative meteorological stations, the use of whole hydrological models such as HBV light and HBV-EHT show good quality (NSE=0.65-0.94, R=0.82-0.97) and practical applicability for rivers runoff estimation. However, such models have a loss of accuracy as they consider the basin a single unit. The Snowmelt Runoff Model (SRM) also performed well (R = 0.71), but requires additional input information on snow cover area from satellite images. The Soil and Water Integrated Model (SWIM), as a distributed type of model, uses a partitioning of the basin into hydrotopes, which complicates the calibration of the river basin model but allows a more accurate description of the processes in its basin (has good calibration quality for a river basin NSE = 0.85). The Water Evaluation and Planning system (WEAP) has a user-friendly interface and good calibration quality (NSE = 0.61, R = 0.88) for large river catchments (in our case 52.2 thousand km2) and can be applied for water management purposes both at national and regional levels. The paper outlined the main conclusions on the application of these models for research purposes.