Comparison of SCS and Green-Ampt Distributed Models for Flood Modelling in a Small Cultivated Catchment in Senegal

Christophe Bouvier,Lamia Bouchenaki,Yves Tramblay

doi:10.3390/geosciences8040122

Abstract

The vulnerability to floods in Africa has increased over the last decades, together with a modification of land cover as urbanized areas are increasing, agricultural practices are changing, and deforestation is increasing. Rainfall-runoff models that properly represent land use change and hydrologic response should be useful for the development of water management and mitigation plans. Although some studies have applied rainfall-runoff models in West Africa for flood modelling, there is still a need to develop such models, while many data are available and have not still been used for modelling improvement. The Ndiba catchment (16.2 km2), which is located in an agricultural area in south Senegal, is such catchment, where a lot of hydro-climatic data has been collected between 1983 and 1992. Twenty-eight flood events have been extracted and modelled by two event-based rainfall-runoff models that are based on the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) or the Green-Ampt (GA) models for runoff, both coupled with the distributed Lag and Route (LR) for routing. Both models were able to reproduce the flood events after calibration, but they had to account for that the infiltration processes are highly dependent on the tillage of the soils and the growing of the crops during the rainy season, which made the initialization of the event-based models difficult. The most influent parameters for both models (the maximal water storage capacity for SCS, the hydraulic conductivity at saturation for Green-Ampt) were mostly related to the development stage of the vegetation, described by a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) anomaly. The SCS model performed finally better than the Green-Ampt model, because Green-Ampt was very sensitive to the variability of the hydraulic conductivity at saturation. The variability of the parameters of the models highlights the complexity of this kind of cultivated catchment, with highly non stationary conditions. The models could be improved by a better knowledge of the tillage practices, and a better integration of these practices in the parameters predictors.

Highlights

The vulnerability to floods in Africa has increased over the last decades, in terms of human fatalities and economic losses [1], while in most of African countries, flood warning and prevision systems are not existent [2]
The ds parameter was set in order to remove the small floods due to secondary rainfalls, which were not seen in the observed data
The goal of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of event-based rainfall-runoff model, such as Soil Conservation Service (SCS)-Lag and Route (LR) or GA-LR for flood prediction in a small catchment that is located in south Senegal

Summary

Introduction

The vulnerability to floods in Africa has increased over the last decades, in terms of human fatalities and economic losses [1], while in most of African countries, flood warning and prevision systems are not existent [2]. There is a need for a better knowledge of these events and to improve rainfall-runoff models that could be used in the development of prevision systems. In West Africa, flood prediction usually derive from synthetic guidelines [7] or regional studies [8,9,10]. Such works are ancient and could be Geosciences 2018, 8, 122; doi:10.3390/geosciences8040122 www.mdpi.com/journal/geosciences. The role of the agriculture on the runoff was clearly shown by [11], who claimed that the runoff conditions are first high before the tillage, and reduce along the rainy season due to the growth of the crops. They found that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) could be a good predictor of the runoff conditions

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Conclusion