Technology has greatly promoted ecohydrological model development, but runoff generation and confluence simulations have fallen behind in ecohydrological model development due to limited innovations. To fully understand ecohydrological processes and accurately describe the coupling between ecological and hydrological processes, a distributed ecohydrological model was constructed by integrating multisource information into MYEH. We mainly describe runoff generation and convergence modules. Based on the improved HBV model and degree-3 hour factor method, runoff generation and snow routines were constructed for semiarid grassland basins. In view of meandering and variable steppe river channels and steep hydrological relief characteristics, a confluence module was constructed; the 1-km bend radius equivalent concept was innovatively proposed to unify river channel bend degrees. The daily runoff simulation validation results obtained using two datasets were R2=0.947 and 0.932, NSE=0.945 and 0.905, and KGE=0.029 and 0.261. In the 3-hour flood simulations, the MYEH model could better restore small long-distance water flows than the confluence method that did not consider actual river lengths or bend energy losses; the MYEH model more accurately simulated the flood peak arrival time than the confluence method that did not consider overflow. The simulated mainstream overflow frequency increased by 0.84/10 years, and significant interaction periods of 10 to 13 years occurred with local precipitation, ecological status and global climate change. An approximately 2-year lag occurred in the global climate change response. This study helps us further understand and reveal the ecohydrological processes of steppe rivers in semiarid regions.

Key Points: • Ecological and evapotranspiration characteristics of ten typical vegetation communities in semi-arid steppe were refined and decomposed. • Sensitive parameters of dynamic evapotranspiration improve the regional simulation effect. • Deep learning was used to downscale regional evapotranspiration at the 3-hour scale. Abstract Reports on ecohydrological models for semi-arid steppe basins with scarce historical data are rare. To fully understand the ecohydrological processes in such areas and accurately describe the coupling and mutual feedback between ecological and hydrological processes, a distributed ecohydrological model was constructed , which integrates multi-source information into the MY Ecohydrology (MYEH) model. This paper mainly describes the evapotranspiration module (Eva module) based on sensitive parameters and deep learning. Based on multi-source meteorological, soil, vegetation, and remote sensing data, the historical dynamic characteristics of ten typical vegetation communities in the semi-arid steppe are refined in this study and seven evaporation (ET) components in the Xilin River Basin (XRB) from 1980 to 2018 are simulated. The results show that the Naive Bayesian model constructed based on the temperature and three types of surface reflectance can clearly distinguish between snow-covered or-free conditions. Based on the refinement of typical vegetation communities, the ET process characteristics of different vegetation communities in response to climate change can be determined. Dynamic sensitive parameters significantly improve the regional ET simulation. Based on the validation with the Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model product and multiple models in multiple time scales (year, quarter, day, 3 h), a relatively consistent and reliable ET process 1 was obtained for the XRB at the 3-hour scale. The uncertainties of adding and dynamizing more ET process parameters and adjusting the algorithm structure must be further studied.