Improved hydrological modelling of urban catchments using runoff coefficients

Abstract

The expansion of built-up areas within urban and peri-urban river catchments has the potential to increase flooding. Hydrological modelling of these catchments is an important tool to analyse and manage the increasing flood hazard, but it requires an understanding of the areas contributing to runoff from the urban parts of the catchment. This is difficult as in many catchments fine resolution data is not available and the connectivity of the impervious areas, sewer networks and the drainage network are not well understood. In this research, we present a novel approach for calculating the separate and combined sewer fractions for an urban river catchment and use these fractions to improve hydrological modelling of the catchment. The fractions are calculated using monthly runoff coefficients from paired rural/urban catchments, with the procedure carried out for 20 highly urbanized catchments within the UK. The calculated fractions have been compared with the OS MasterMap high-resolution land use data set and also verified against results obtained with the standard method of using hourly rainfall-runoff data in an event-based approach. Hydrological modelling using the physically-based Shetran system demonstrates improved results using the approach developed here. For urban and peri-urban catchments without fine resolution sewer and hydrological data, it is recommended that this new method should be applied before detailed hydrological modelling of the catchments is undertaken in order to evaluate the flows to the drainage network and determine the impact of urbanisation on the water balance.