Basin rotation method for analyzing the directional influence of moving storms on basin response

Abstract

Hydrologic responses to variations in storm direction provide useful information for the analysis and prediction of floods and the development of watershed management strategies. However, the prediction of hydrologic responses to changes in storm direction is a difficult task that requires meteorological simulations and extensive computation. It is also difficult to identify the center of rotation of a storm affecting a basin of interest. Therefore, we propose a simple approach of rotating the basin position relative to the storm within the rainfall–runoff simulation model instead of changing the pathway of the storm, which we term the basin rotation method (BRM). The proposed BRM was tested on four major typhoon events in South Korea. The results illustrated that the original basin orientation (i.e., before it was rotated) exhibits earlier and higher peak discharge and earlier recession compared to the basin after rotation. We conclude that the proposed method (BRM) is a viable alternative for use in assessing the directional influence of moving storms on floods caused by historical rather than hypothetical storm events.