A Method for Estimating the Regional Initial and Constant Loss for Design Flood Estimation in West Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

Floods are known as one of the world’s most frequent and devastating events. Techniques to predict and estimate the size of floods is depend on the availability of hydrological data. Using the conceptual of lump model, rainfall-runoff method is widely used in design flood estimation, which represents the input of rainfall and catchment characteristics such as rainfall depth, rainfall intensity, baseflow and losses. 7o calculate the catchments runoff, amount of losses shall be determine accurately by considering various source of the rainfall losses such as evaporation, inßltration, interception, depression storage and loss in groundwater recharge. In Malaysia, the common technique to estimate the hydrological losses is using initial and constant loss method. Furthermore, the value has been used in Urban Stormwater Manual for Malaysia (USMA) are adopted from the other literatures which is not represented the value from local catchment.7he objective of this study is to derive the initial and constant loss values using the data from selected local catchments in west Peninsular Malaysia. 7he calculated initial and constant loss will be further used to derive design flood discharge based on the design rainfall. An initial loss and constant loss model was examined in this study to observe the loss rate parameters in heterogeneous catchments and evaluate their signißcance as well as their potential influence on design peak floods. 7he study has been utilised the rainfall and runoff data from 113 storms over 15 catchments. 7he loss parameters were obtained from model optimi3ation using the HEC-HMS Modeling program. From the analyses, the median initial loss is 21.54mm with the standard deviation 7.85mm. 7he value shows higher than the value adopted in USMA. Meanwhile, the value for constant loss is 8.07mm which between the range of USMA. Based on the ßndings of design initial loss analyses, the values of initial loss were 49.3, 57.6, 64.1, 69.4, 73.3 and 76.6 for ARI 2,5,10,20,50 and 100, respectively. 7he percentage error between design initial loss and constant loss method and flood frequency method shows good results which are most of the percentage error less than 35%. It shows that the design initial loss and constant loss method produce reasonable accurate results when compared to the rainfall-runoff method and flood frequency method. Based on the ßndings, it can be suggested that the regional design initial loss and the constant loss rates would be able to serve reasonably well in determining catchment loss for the design purposes.