Spatial characteristics of thunderstorm rainfall fields and their relation to runoff

The main aim of this study was to assess the ability of simple geometric measures of thunderstorm rainfall in explaining the runoff response from the watershed. For calculation of storm geometric properties (e.g. areal coverage of storm, areal coverage of the high-intensity portion of the storm, position of storm centroid and the movement of storm centroid in time), spatial information of rainfall is needed. However, generally the rainfall data consists of rainfall depth values over an unevenly spaced network of raingauges. For this study, rainfall depth values were available for 91 raingauges in a watershed of about 148 km2. There was a question about which interpolation method should be used for obtaining uniformly gridded data. Therefore, a small study was undertaken to compare cross-validation statistics and computed geometric parameters using two interpolation methods (kriging and multiquadric). These interpolation methods were used to estimate precipitation over a uniform 100 m × 100 m grid. The cross-validation results from the two methods were generally similar and neither method consistently performed better than the other did. In view of these results we decided to use multiquadric interpolation method for the rest of the study. Several geometric measures were then computed from interpolated surfaces for about 300 storm events occurring in a 17-year period. The correlation of these computed measures with basin runoff were then observed in an attempt to assess their relative importance in basin runoff response. It was observed that the majority of the storms (observed in the study) covered the entire watershed. Therefore, it was concluded that the areal coverage of storm was not a good indicator of the amount of runoff produced. The areal coverage of the storm core (10-min intensity greater than 25 mm/h), however, was found to be a much better predictor of runoff volume and peak rate. The most important variable in runoff production was found to be the volume of the storm core. It was also observed that the position of the storm core relative to the watershed outlet becomes more important as the catchment size increases, with storms positioned in the central portion of the watershed producing more runoff than those positioned near the outlet or near the head of the watershed. This observation indicates the importance of interaction of catchment size and shape with the spatial storm structure in runoff generation. Antecedent channel wetness was found to be of some importance in explaining runoff for the largest of the three watersheds studied but antecedent watershed wetness did not appreciably contributed to runoff explanation. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Characterization of process-oriented hydrologic model behavior with temporal sensitivity analysis for flash floods in Mediterranean catchments

This paper presents a detailed analysis of 10 flash flood events in the Mediterranean region using the distributed hydrological model MARINE. Characterizing catchment response during flash flood events may provide new and valuable insight into the dynamics involved for extreme catchment response and their dependency on physiographic properties and flood severity. The main objective of this study is to analyze flash-flood-dedicated hydrologic model sensitivity with a new approach in hydrology, allowing model outputs variance decomposition for temporal patterns of parameter sensitivity analysis. Such approaches enable ranking of uncertainty sources for nonlinear and nonmonotonic mappings with a low computational cost. Hydrologic model and sensitivity analysis are used as learning tools on a large flash flood dataset. With Nash performances above 0.73 on average for this extended set of 10 validation events, the five sensitive parameters of MARINE process-oriented distributed model are analyzed. This contribution shows that soil depth explains more than 80% of model output variance when most hydrographs are peaking. Moreover, the lateral subsurface transfer is responsible for 80% of model variance for some catchment-flood events’ hydrographs during slow-declining limbs. The unexplained variance of model output representing interactions between parameters reveals to be very low during modeled flood peaks and informs that model parsimonious parameterization is appropriate to tackle the problem of flash floods. Interactions observed after model initialization or rainfall intensity peaks incite to improve water partition representation between flow components and initialization itself. This paper gives a practical framework for application of this method to other models, landscapes and climatic conditions, potentially helping to improve processes understanding and representation

Sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation for distributed hydrological modeling: potential of variational methods

Variational methods are widely used for the analysis and control of computationally intensive spatially distributed systems. In particular, the adjoint state method enables a very efficient calculation of the derivatives of an objective function (response function to be analysed or cost function to be optimised) with respect to model inputs. In this contribution, it is shown that the potential of variational methods for distributed catchment scale hydrology should be considered. A distributed flash flood model, coupling kinematic wave overland flow and Green Ampt infiltration, is applied to a small catchment of the Thoré basin and used as a relatively simple (synthetic observations) but didactic application case. It is shown that forward and adjoint sensitivity analysis provide a local but extensive insight on the relation between the assigned model parameters and the simulated hydrological response. Spatially distributed parameter sensitivities can be obtained for a very modest calculation effort (~6 times the computing time of a single model run) and the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the Jacobian matrix provides an interesting perspective for the analysis of the rainfall-runoff relation. For the estimation of model parameters, adjoint-based derivatives were found exceedingly efficient in driving a bound-constrained quasi-Newton algorithm. The reference parameter set is retrieved independently from the optimization initial condition when the very common dimension reduction strategy (i.e. scalar multipliers) is adopted. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis results suggest that most of the variability in this high-dimensional parameter space can be captured with a few orthogonal directions. A parametrization based on the SVD leading singular vectors was found very promising but should be combined with another regularization strategy in order to prevent overfitting

Superficial Water Balance of the Watershed at Epitacio Pessoa Dam used Digital Information Terrain

Currently, there is an urgent need to manage and rationalize the use of water resources worldwide, especially in areas subject to periodic droughts such as the semiarid Northeast of Brazil. One of the first steps of the great task of managing water resources is on the estimate of the supply of water within the basin. To do so, it is necessary to study the interactions between climate, land use and physiographic. Given the importance of proper management of water resources, the aim of this study is to examine the impacts of space-time variability of rainfall, soil depth and plant cover on the production of water from the reservoir basin Epitácio Pessoa, located in semiarid state of Paraiba - Brazil. A program called TOPAZ was used to obtain the physical characteristics of the basin, based on data from digital terrain elevation. The Landsat TM-5 was used to estimate the vegetation cover. Among several scenarios, the fifth was the best represented the overland flow in the reservoir basin Epitácio Pessoa. In general, the model responded well to the space-time variability of rain. Approximately 12% of rainfall was turned into the confluence Epitácio Pessoa. The coefficients of determination and Nash were on average 0.89 and 92% respectively. The results showed that there were changes in the pattern of runoff upstream of the dam. These changes are resulting in delayed and reduced runoff tributary to Epitácio Pessoa, due to the construction of new reservoirs upstream of it

Application of temporal streamflow descriptors in hydrologic model parameter estimation

This paper presents a parameter estimation approach based on hydrograph descriptors that capture dominant streamflow characteristics at three timescales (monthly, yearly, and record extent). The scheme, entitled hydrograph descriptors multitemporal sensitivity analyses (HYDMUS), yields an ensemble of model simulations generated from a reduced parameter space, based on a set of streamflow descriptors that emphasize the timescale dynamics of streamflow record. In this procedure the posterior distributions of model parameters derived at coarser timescales are used to sample model parameters for the next finer timescale. The procedure was used to estimate the parameters of the Sacramento soil moisture accounting model (SAC-SMA) for the Leaf River, Mississippi. The results indicated that in addition to a significant reduction in the range of parameter uncertainty, HYDMUS improved parameter identifiability for all 13 of the model parameters. The performance of the procedure was compared to four previous calibration studies on the same watershed. Although our application of HYDMUS did not explicitly consider the error at each simulation time step during the calibration process, the model performance was, in some important respects, found to be better than in previous deterministic studies. Copyright 2005 by the American Geophysical Union

A hydroeconomic modeling framework for optimal integrated management of forest and water

[EN] Forests play a determinant role in the hydrologic cycle, with water being the most important ecosystem service they provide in semiarid regions. However, this contribution is usually neither quantified nor explicitly valued. The aim of this study is to develop a novel hydroeconomic modeling framework for assessing and designing the optimal integrated forest and water management for forested catchments. The optimization model explicitly integrates changes in water yield in the stands (increase in groundwater recharge) induced by forest management and the value of the additional water provided to the system. The model determines the optimal schedule of silvicultural interventions in the stands of the catchment in order to maximize the total net benefit in the system. Canopy cover and biomass evolution over time were simulated using growth and yield allometric equations specific for the species in Mediterranean conditions. Silvicultural operation costs according to stand density and canopy cover were modeled using local cost databases. Groundwater recharge was simulated using HYDRUS, calibrated and validated with data from the experimental plots. In order to illustrate the presented modeling framework, a case study was carried out in a planted pine forest (Pinus halepensis Mill.) located in south-western Valencia province (Spain). The optimized scenario increased groundwater recharge. This novel modeling framework can be used in the design of a payment for environmental services scheme in which water beneficiaries could contribute to fund and promote efficient forest management operations.This study is a component of four research projects: "CGL2011-28776-C02-02, HYDROSIL'', ''CGL2013-48424-C2-1-R, IMPADAPT'' and CGL2014-58127-C3-2, SILWAMED, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and FEDER funds, and Determination of hydrologic and forest recovery factors in Mediterranean forests and their social perception, supported by the Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs. The authors are grateful to the Valencia Regional Government (CMAAUV, Generalitat Valenciana) and the VAERSA staff for their support in allowing the use of the La Hunde experimental forest and for their assistance in carrying out the fieldwork. Experimental data belong to Reforest research group. 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