Cantoni E. auteur aut IRD Tramblay Yves auteur aut IRD Grimaldi S. auteur aut IRD Salamon P. auteur aut IRD Dakhlaoui H. auteur aut IRD Dezetter Alain auteur aut IRD Thiemig V. auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf reformatted digital access Study region: This study is focused on 6 catchments in Tunisia, in North Africa, under a semi-arid climate where daily river discharge and precipitation observations are available between 1992 and 2006.Study focus: The distributed hydrological model LISFLOOD has been compared with a lumped model, GR4J, to reproduce river runoff and floods, using observed rainfall interpolated from rain gauges and from the ERA5 reanalysis.New hydrological insights for the region under study: LISFLOOD and GR4J with their default pa-rameters have little skill in Tunisia, but when calibrated, both hydrological models provide similar performance to reproduce river discharge,with a mean KGE of 0.65 for GR4J driven by observed rainfall, and 0.59 with ERA5, and similarly a mean KGE of 0.59 for LISFLOOD driven by observed rainfall and 0.48 with ERA5. All model simulations perform very similarly using either observed rainfall data from rain gauges inter-polated over the basins or ERA5 rainfall, indicating its value as an alternative to observations in data-scarce areas such as Tunisia. The development of regional databases of river discharge ob-servations in North Africa could allow the calibration of such hydrological models on a larger scale for operational flood modeling and forecasting. specialized Floods Tunisia LISFLOOD EFAS GR4J ERA5 TUNISIE 062 020 42 101169 [15 p.] 2022 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010085962 10.1016/j.ejrh.2022.101169 [F B010085962] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010085962 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/2022-09/010085962.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2022-09-28 2025-02-24 fdi:010085962 fre