Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Floodplains provide a variety of hydrological and ecological functions and are therefore of great importance. The flooding frequency, as well as the height and duration of inundations are particularly relevant for ecosystem states and are dependent on the exchange between surface water and groundwater. In this study, we developed a fully distributed model approach to simulate distributed groundwater levels in a floodplain in Hesse, Germany (14.8 km<jats:sup>2</jats:sup>). To overcome the problem of large computation times, we simplified the surface water equation. Thus, the water surface of flooding is at the same level everywhere and the dynamic effect of the flooding is ignored. In this way, it was possible to run the model 5000 times and investigate its parameter uncertainty using Latin hypercube sampling. Behavioral model runs were selected based on a threshold criterion of a mean root‐mean‐square error that was smaller than 0.26 m. All the simulated groundwater wells show an individual RMSE between 0.17 and 0.41 m for the calibration period. Regarding the parameterization, the model shows rather large variance in parameters that are capable of generating good simulations: a range of saturated conductivity of 2793 m/d, porosity of 0.4 m<jats:sup>3</jats:sup>/m<jats:sup>3</jats:sup>, residual wetness of soil of 0.2 m<jats:sup>3</jats:sup>/m<jats:sup>3</jats:sup>/soil and range of soil thickness of 2.9 m.</jats:p>