Development of Topography-Based River Width Estimation Model for Medium-Sized Mountainous Watersheds
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 25, Issue 5
Abstract
River width is an essential physical variable for the simulation of rainfall-runoff processes using distributed hydrologic models. In this paper, a model of river width integrating the effects of an upstream drainage area and terrain topography is proposed for the derivation of a spatial variation of a river width of medium-sized mountainous watersheds based on a digital elevation model (DEM). Tests of the model for three medium-sized watersheds, including Daheba, Changhua, and Yuqian, suggest that the spatial variation of the river width is dominated by topography in terms of slope near the riverbed. Wider river reaches are often located at flatter terrains with a larger upstream drainage area. In addition, the river width estimated method of the TOPographic Kinematic Approximation and Integration (TOPKAPI) model, which only uses the upstream drainage area to estimate river widths, is compared with the proposed model. Relative to a percent bias of 15%–19% of the river width model (GeoRW), the error of the method in TOPKAPI is obviously larger, at about 32.9%–65.4%. A comparison of the proposed model with the river width estimated method of the TOPKAPI model based on the upstream drainage area justifies its usefulness for medium-sized mountainous watersheds.
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Data Availability Statement
Data generated or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFC1508103 and 2016YFC0402705), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51679061 and 51979070), the Key R&D Program of Ningxia (Grant No. 2018BEG02010), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2016B04714).
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Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 25 • Issue 5 • May 2020
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©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Mar 11, 2019
Accepted: Sep 25, 2019
Published online: Mar 6, 2020
Published in print: May 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Aug 6, 2020
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