Abstract
To date, floods have become one of the most severe natural disasters on Earth. Flood forecasting with hydrological models is an important non-engineering measure for flood control and disaster reduction. The Xin’anjiang (XAJ) model is the most widely used hydrological model in China for flood forecasting, while the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is widely applied for daily and monthly simulation and has shown its potential for flood simulation. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the SWAT model in simulating floods at a sub-daily time-scale in a slightly larger basin and compare that with the XAJ model. Taking Qilijie Basin (southeast of China) as a study area, this paper developed the XAJ model and SWAT model at a sub-daily time-scale. The results showed that the XAJ model had a better performance than the sub-daily SWAT model regarding relative runoff error (RRE) but the SWAT model performed well according to relative peak discharge error (RPE) and error of occurrence time of peak flow (PTE). The SWAT model performed unsatisfactorily in simulating low flows due to the daily calculation of base flow but behaved quite well in simulating high flows. We also evaluated the effect of spatial scale on the SWAT model. The results showed that the SWAT model had a good applicability at different spatial scales. In conclusion, the sub-daily SWAT model is a promising tool for flood simulation though more improvements remain to be studied further.
Highlights
IntroductionWith the economic and social development, the global climate and the underlying surface have changed, causing changes in the water circulation process of river basins and causing more serious and frequent floods
Flooding is one of the most common natural phenomena
Significantly sensitive parameters were ALPHA_BNK, CH_N2 and CH_K2. They were all connected with flow routing. In both daily and flood simulation, ALPHA_BNK, CH_N2 and CH_K2 were significantly sensitive which means that flow routing was very important for the simulation of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model in this study area, while their values were all larger in flood simulation
Summary
With the economic and social development, the global climate and the underlying surface have changed, causing changes in the water circulation process of river basins and causing more serious and frequent floods. Severe flood disasters have become one of the most serious water issues, which have brought incalculable losses and caused serious threats to the safety of lives and properties. Flood forecasting is an important non-engineering measure for flood control and disaster reduction. And accurate flood forecasting is the most effective way to control flooding and reduce flooding damage. A hydrological model is a modern flood forecasting method developing with the rapid development of electronic computer technology. We can evaluate the performance of these hydrological models and make full preparations for flood forecasting. Since the first watershed hydrological model—the Stanford model—was applied in
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