Comparing Three Hydrological Models for Flash Flood Simulations in 13 Humid and Semi-humid Mountainous Catchments

Abstract

Flash flood disaster ranks top among all the natural hazards across the world due to its high frequency, severity and fatality. However, flash flood simulation is still challenging in small and medium-sized catchments with complex orography, flashy hydrological responses and poor observations. Three distributed hydrological models, i.e., TOPModel, HEC and CNFF, are selected to simulate flash floods in seven humid and six semi-humid catchments in China, with consideration of water balance (RER), peak flow rate (REQ) and its occurrence time (TP), hydrograph variation (SNSE) and model uncertainty. Influences of five catchment attributes are further investigated on individual model performances. All three models perform satisfactorily in humid catchments, but less satisfactorily in semi-humid catchments. Water balance is well obtained by CNFF, followed by HEC and TOPModel. Peak flow rate and its occurrence time are most accurately captured by CNFF and HEC, respectively. Hydrograph variations are well reproduced by HEC and CNFF. TOPModel performs well for picking peak flow and hydrograph variation in humid catchments. Uncertainty interval is narrowest for HEC with average relative interval length at 95% confidence level being 0.78 ~ 2.53. Most observations are bracketed by uncertainty intervals for TOPModel (64.79% ~ 91.91% of total). Three model performance indices (i.e., RER, REQ, and SNSE) are mainly affected by drainage area and forest ratio across humid and semi-humid catchments, while TP performance is mainly affected by mean slope in humid catchments.