Abstract
Flood simulation and forecasting in various types of watersheds is a hot issue in hydrology. Conceptual hydrological models have been widely applied to flood forecasting for decades. With the development of economy, modern China faces with severe flood disasters in all types of watersheds include humid, semi-humid semi-arid and arid watersheds. However, conceptual model-based flood forecasting in semi-humid semi-arid and arid regions is still challenging. To investigate the applicability of conceptual hydrological models for flood forecasting in the above mentioned regions, three typical conceptual models, include Xinanjiang (XAJ), mix runoff generation (MIX) and northern Shannxi (NS), are applied to 3 humid, 3 semi-humid semi-arid, and 3 arid watersheds. The rainfall-runoff data of the 9 watersheds are analyzed based on statistical analysis and information theory, and the model performances are compared and analyzed based on boxplots and scatter plots. It is observed the complexity of drier watershed data is higher than that of the wetter watersheds. This indicates the flood forecasting is harder in drier watersheds. Simulation results indicate all models perform satisfactorily in humid watersheds and only NS model is applicable in arid watersheds. Model with consideration of saturation excess runoff generation (XAJ and MIX) perform better than the infiltration excess-based NS model in semi-humid semi-arid watersheds. It is concluded more accurate mix runoff generation theory, more stable and efficient numerical solution of infiltration equation and rainfall data with higher spatial-temporal resolution are main obstacles for conceptual model-based flood simulation and forecasting.
Highlights
With the development of community economy, the trend of urbanization is increasing day by day [1,2]
The rainfall, which falls on the ground surface, is first divided into surface runoff and infiltration flow according to the improved Green-Ampt infiltration excess curve, and the infiltrated water is accepted by a saturation excess-based module to compute the saturation surface runoff, interflow, and groundwater runoff, respectively
Where Qt denotes the observed watershed outlet discharge at time step t; Pt − i denotes the observed areal mean rainfall at time step t − i; i = 0, 1, . . . , nP − 1; nP denotes the maximum order of the rainfall; F denotes the mapping relationship which represents the complexity contained in the observed rainfall-runoff data; PMI_IVS denotes partial mutual information (PMI) based input variable selection (IVS) method
Summary
With the development of community economy, the trend of urbanization is increasing day by day [1,2]. The demands of humid area flood forecasting hasten the birth of a storage excess runoff generation-based Xinanjiang watershed rainfall-runoff hydrological model (XAJ) [25,26,27,28]. In order to solve the problems encountered in arid area flood forecasting, an infiltration excess runoff generation-based Northern Shaanxi watershed rainfall-runoff hydrological model (NS). The vertical mix model is theoretically acceptable to some extent, considering the hydrological-physical processes of the combined infiltration and storage excess runoff generation mechanisms, and the simulation accuracy is satisfactory and acceptable. We apply three widely used conceptual rainfall-runoff hydrological models (XAJ, NS, and MIX models) in 9 typical watersheds, which locate in humid, semi-humid semi-arid, and arid regions, to investigate the applicability of everyday utilized conceptual models. The development trend of conceptual hydrological models is prospected
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