Abstract
Water balance models provide insights into ongoing changes in the water cycle. Among them, monthly water balance models (MWBMs) are especially suitable for large-sample and global assessments, which are important for adaptation to global environmental change. This study evaluates monthly water balances from 14 different models across more than 2,000 global catchments, comparing the modelś capacities to reproduce water cycle processes and produce results. We showed that most of the considered models get reasonable runoff simulations in most settings, however notably not in catchments at latitudes above 60°N or when the ratio of snowfall to total precipitation is larger than 20 %. By contrast, the inclusion of a non-linear snow module enabled the extended models to achieve similarly good performance in snow-affected basins as in non-snow basins. The improved fit was not mainly attributed to an …