Investigation of the Effects of DEM Creation Methods on the Performance of a Semidistributed Model: TOPMODEL
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20, Issue 11
Abstract
Digital elevation models (DEMs), because of their simple structure and high performance, play an important role in rainfall-runoff modeling. In this paper, six different methods were used to create DEM. The TOPMODEL, which is a semidistributed and topographic-based rainfall-runoff model, was employed to investigate the effects of the DEM creation methods on the results of such models. The results showed that the topographic index is highly sensitive to the interpolation method used in DEM creation. The consequences of this sensitivity were illustrated by the extent and distribution of the saturated zone across the study watershed. While the effect of the DEM creation method on the amount of surface runoff is significant, the effects on the mean daily discharge could be ignored. The shape and peak flow of simulated hydrograph showed a meaningful sensitivity to the type of DEM. The maximum difference of the Nash-Sutcliffe values for hydrograph simulation among all interpolation methods were obtained as approximately 2.5 and 23.3% for daily and hourly time steps, respectively.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 20 • Issue 11 • November 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 6, 2014
Accepted: Feb 9, 2015
Published online: Mar 19, 2015
Discussion open until: Aug 19, 2015
Published in print: Nov 1, 2015
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