Design soil moisture estimation by comparing continuous and storm‐based rainfall‐runoff modeling

Abstract

In recent years local, national, and international authorities have showed an increasing awareness of flood and inundation hazard, likely due to the large floods which occurred in the past years in many regions of the world. In this context, the estimation of the design flood values to be adopted for flood risk assessment or floodplain management represents a crucial factor. In the case of ungauged or scarcely gauged catchments where a sufficiently long discharge time series is missing, a relevant uncertainty is involved in the flood frequency analysis and a possible solution to reduce this uncertainty is the application of continuous simulation (CS) approaches. Because of the complex structure of this type of approaches and pursuing the parameters parsimony criteria, in the hydrological practice the approaches based on the design storm (DS) estimation are more widely known and applied, mainly for their simplicity. However, one major limit of the DS method is the choice of the “design soil moisture” conditions, representing a critical parameter for assessing the initial wetness of the basin. To that end, this study of investigating six subcatchments of the upper Tiber River basin (Central Italy), with drainage area ranging from 13 to 284 km2, proposes a procedure based on the application of the CS approach as a tool to define the design soil moisture to be afterwards incorporated into the more simple DS method. For each catchment, the procedure consists of (1) stochastic generation of long synthetic rainfall and temperature series starting from observed hourly data; (2) application of a lumped continuous rainfall‐runoff model to generate synthetic discharge series and, hence, to obtain the corresponding flood frequency curves; (3) estimation of the design soil moisture, for each return period, by varying in the DS approach the initial wetness conditions of the catchment so that the peak discharge estimated by the DS method matches the one given by the synthetic flood frequency curve. Moreover, in order to apply the more simple DS approach avoiding the use of the CS one, a preliminary analysis to regionalize the design soil moisture as a function of the geo‐morphological characteristics and the return period is also shown.