Abstract
The Muskingum method is a hydrological flow routing model with lumped parameters, which describes the transformation of discharge waves in a river bed using two equations. The first one is the continuity equation (conservation of mass) and the second equation is the relationship between the storage, inflow, and outflow of the reach (the discharge storage equation). These equations are applied within a river reach between two cross sections of a river. The parameters of the model can be estimated by several methods. Here the classical graphic method is compared with two new methods where a genetic algorithm and harmony search was used for optimization. The discrete state space formulation of the Muskingum method was applied on the lower Morava reach between Moravský Svätý Ján and Záhorská Ves. The results showed a good degree of accuracy of all three methods, which were assessed by the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient.