Gecombineerd gebruik van hydrologische modellen en afstandswaarnemingen voor waterbeheersdoeleinden

status: publishe

Characteristics of rainstorms over a temperate region derived from multiple time series of weather radar images

Weather radars provide invaluable data to characterize rainstorms spatially and temporally. A correct description of rainfall in space and time contributes to improvements in hydrological modeling and design, and ultimately to a better water management. To provide a stochastic rainfall model with an accurate parameterization, frontal rain systems over Belgium (Western Europe) are analyzed. In this paper different structures within rainstorms and their relative spatial positions are studied, the movement of rainstorms is analyzed and distribution functions are constructed to characterize several features of rainstorms statistically. A correlation technique is applied to determine the direction and velocity of the translation of storms. Well developed rainstorms are isolated in radar images and their dimensions and shape are investigated. To describe the dimensions of the rainstorms three methods are proposed and compared. Statistical analyses provide probability distributions for the dimensions, the perimeter, the area, the velocity and the direction of the movement for rainstorms. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of clusters in a rainstorm is studied. It is shown that a simple Poisson process performs well in the representation of this spatial distribution. Two methods to calculate the single parameter in a Poisson process (in 1D and in 2D) are proposed and compared. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Scenario-based decision support for an integrated management of water resources

© 2017 International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research. In this study, analyses of future scenarios of water demand and supply as well as an assessment of trade-offs for water allocation across the different water use sectors in the upper Blue Nile basin are made. Different periods of regulation of Lake Tana (Ethiopia) and subsequent impacts on the lake level hydrological regime are investigated. A decision support system is developed and available water supply for normal- and low-flow hydrological conditions are determined based on recorded flow data and a simple rainfall-runoff model. Different scenarios have been triggered and simulations are conducted to understand the implications of planned water resource developments in the area. We found that the annual inflows to Lake Tana under an average hydrological condition are about 5.7 × 109 m3 and are estimated to reduce by about 27% when all planned water resources development projects are implemented in the catchment. These projects aim at the generation of 460 MW hydroelectric power and about a billion m3 per annum supply of water to the large-scale irrigation schemes. During low-flow conditions, supply will run short of demands and the lake water level can drop by 0.3 m from the natural outlet level (1785 m a.s.l). Lake water levels and long-term lake level fluctuations have been affected significantly due to regulation with subsequent impacts on the lake ecology. An upstream–downstream cooperation, transparency and participation in the decision making and establishment of an adequate data acquisition system are critically important elements in the management of water resources in the basin.status: publishe

Improving extreme value behaviour of fine-scale stochastic point process models

Urbanization and climate change encourage water managers to improve their ability to predict possible future rainfall events. To study impacts on urban drainage and river systems and assess their vulnerability, long term simulations at fine time scales, including extreme rain storms of high return periods, are of critical importance. Bartlett-Lewis rectangular pulses models are considered to provide such long term simulations. These models have proven to be capable of repro-ducing general historical rainfall characteristics but tend to overestimate extremes at higher levels of aggregation, and underestimate them at lower levels of aggregation. Furthermore, unrealistically large rainfall events are occasionally generated during simulation. This might lead to serious implications when the simulated rainfall series are used for im-pact analysis in urban hydrology. The presented research focuses on ways to improve extreme value behaviour of the Bartlett-Lewis models by introducing the third order moment of rainfall intensity in the objective function. By doing so, the tail of the rainfall distribution is represented better during calibration. The extreme values generated by a standard Bartlett-Lewis model is analysed using the Peak-Over-Threshold method. Secondly, the occasional simulation of unreal-istically large rainfall events is addressed by an adjustment to the model structure. By truncating the gamma distribution responsible for the simulation of cell durations, the probability of sampling extremely long rainfall events is drastically reduced

Analyzing runoff processes through conceptual hydrological modeling in the Upper Blue Nile Basin, Ethiopia

© Author(s) 2014. Understanding runoff processes in a basin is of paramount importance for the effective planning and management of water resources, in particular in data-scarce regions such as the Upper Blue Nile. Hydrological models representing the underlying hydrological processes can predict river discharges from ungauged catchments and allow for an understanding of the rainfall-runoff processes in those catchments. In this paper, such a conceptual process-based hydrological model is developed and applied to the upper Gumara and Gilgel Abay catchments (both located within the Upper Blue Nile Basin, the Lake Tana sub-basin) to study the runoff mechanisms and rainfall-runoff processes in the basin. Topography is considered as a proxy for the variability of most of the catchment characteristics. We divided the catchments into different runoff production areas using topographic criteria. Impermeable surfaces (rock outcrops and hard soil pans, common in the Upper Blue Nile Basin) were considered separately in the conceptual model. Based on model results, it can be inferred that about 65% of the runoff appears in the form of interflow in the Gumara study catchment, and baseflow constitutes the larger proportion of runoff (44-48%) in the Gilgel Abay catchment. Direct runoff represents a smaller fraction of the runoff in both catchments (18-19% for the Gumara, and 20% for the Gilgel Abay) and most of this direct runoff is generated through infiltration excess runoff mechanism from the impermeable rocks or hard soil pans. The study reveals that the hillslopes are recharge areas (sources of interflow and deep percolation) and direct runoff as saturated excess flow prevails from the flat slope areas. Overall, the model study suggests that identifying the catchments into different runoff production areas based on topography and including the impermeable rocky areas separately in the modeling process mimics the rainfall-runoff process in the Upper Blue Nile Basin well and yields a useful result for operational management of water resources in this data-scarce region.status: publishe

Comparative analysis between analytical approximations and numerical solutions describing recession flow in unconfined hillslope aquifers

Recession flow of aquifers from a hillslope can be described by the non-linear Boussinesq equation. Under strong assumptions and for specific conceptual formulations, different authors derived analytical approximations or linearized versions to this partial differential equation. A comparative analysis between some analytical approximations of the Boussinesq equation and the numerical solution of the recession flow of an unconfined homogeneous aquifer (horizontal, inclined and concave aquifer floor) was carried out. The objective was to define the range where the analytical solutions approximate the numerical solution. The latter was considered in this study as the reference method, because it requires fewer assumptions. From the considered analytical approximations, exponential decay relationships were found to be mainly valid for fine domain materials when horizontal, mild slopes (less than 2%) and concave aquifer floors were considered, but failed to reproduce coarse aquifer numerical model outflows, in contrast to the quadratic decay relationship, which better reproduce outflows in such domains. On the basis of the comparative analysis, it has been found that recession flows obtained with the considered analytical approximations yield similar values only for certain ranges of aquifer properties and geometries