Hydrological modeling of storm runoff and snowmelt in Taunton River Basin by applications of HEC-HMS and PRMS models

Abstract

Reliable predictions of storm runoff from rainfall and snowmelt are important for flood hazard mitigation and resilience. In this study, the HEC-HMS and PRMS hydrological models have been applied to simulate storm runoff in Taunton River Basin for the storm event in 2010 when maximum rainfall intensity reached approximate 5 in/day in March, and the snowfall reached about 11 inches in December. Model parameters were calibrated, and model performance was evaluated by comparing model-simulated daily stream flow with observations. For the rainstorm period during March–April, results indicate that both HEC-HMS and PRMS provide very good predictions of rainfall runoff with the correlation values above 0.95, and PRMS produces lower root-mean-square errors than those from HEC-HMS. Over the 12-month period including the snowfall in December, the time series of flow by PRMS match better with observations than those from the HEC-HMS. The 12-month overall correlation values for HEC-HMS and PRMS are 0.91 and 0.97 at Bridgewater Station, and 0.89 and 0.97 at Threemile Station, respectively. For an extreme storm scenario of the maximum historical 36.7-inch snowfall in early February in combination with the rainstorm in March–April of 2010, model simulations indicate that the flow would substantially increase by about 50% or more. Comparisons between HEC-HMS and RPMS models have been analyzed to provide references for storm runoff modeling.