Enhancing GEOGLOWS River Forecast System with a High-Resolution Pre-Processing Approach for Runoff Bias Correction

Accurate streamflow information is critical for early flood and drought warning. However, global hydrological forecasting systems are affected by residual errors in meteorological forcing, model structure, and routing, which propagate into simulated streamflow. Within the GEOGLOWS River Forecast System (RFS), ERA5 runoff biases are routed into streamflow simulations. The most effective operational bias-correction method, MFDC-QM, requires local discharge observations and cannot be applied consistently in ungauged basins. This study evaluates a pre-routing, grid-scale runoff bias-correction framework that adjusts ERA5 runoff before routing by combining Flow Duration Curve (FDC) mapping and Sparse Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) matching, using GSCD as a spatially distributed reference runoff data. Baseline GEOGLOWS RFS, pre-routing correction, and MFDC-QM were compared for 1980–2025 using 16,517 gauging stations, Kling–Gupta Efficiency (KGE), and paired significance tests. Globally, the median KGE increased modestly from 0.16 to 0.22, compared with 0.48 for MFDC-QM. Results demonstrate a clear regional dependence: pre-routing correction produced statistically significant gains in South America and Africa (p < 0.05), where ERA5 runoff exhibits stronger residual biases, but had limited effects in Europe and North America, where dense hydrometeorological networks likely impose stronger observational constraints on the underlying reanalysis. These patterns show that pre-routing correction is most valuable where residual forcing bias is large and observational constraints are limited, complementing observation-based post-processing in ungauged, data-limited regions.