Investigation of Infiltration Loss in North Central Texas by Retrieving Initial Abstraction and Constant Loss from Observed Rainfall and Runoff Events
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 28, Issue 5
Abstract
Accurate modeling of infiltration losses is vital for runoff estimation and thus the development of flood design/protection criteria and water management schemes, etc. In design flood practices, the initial abstraction and constant loss (IACL) method has been widely applied due to its simplicity. However, due to a lack of physical equivalent properties, the IACL method is often subject to issues in parametrization and has large dependency on calibration efforts for storm events. Despite the wide range/variability of IACL values, a single set of IA and CL values is normally adopted for specific flood frequency, which may introduce uncertainty and bias in resulting peak streamflow. In this study, we identified a total of 2,036 rainfall-runoff events for 18 watersheds in North Central Texas to estimate the total losses with their IA and CL components based on time-series of mean areal precipitation (MAP) and streamflow data. Threshold behavior is found for all studied subbasins between the summation of gross rainfall and antecedent soil moisture versus runoff depth: below the threshold, runoff depth is minimal; whereas above it, runoff is largely linearly correlated with the summation of rainfall and antecedent soil moisture. This finding provides a convenient way to estimate/predict total loss or runoff depth given MAP and antecedent soil moisture. In addition, this study shows that the IA and CL values can be approximated by the gamma and Weibull distributions, respectively. The fitted distributions of IA and CL values can be applied in a Monte Carlo simulation framework to stochastically simulate numerous rainfall-runoff events for a flood frequency analysis.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the funding support from US Army Corps of Engineers (Project No. W9126G-17-2-SOI-0977). We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for providing insightful and constructive comments that helped us make significant improvements to the earlier version of this manuscript.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 28 • Issue 5 • May 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 25, 2022
Accepted: Dec 23, 2022
Published online: Mar 2, 2023
Published in print: May 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Aug 2, 2023
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Climates
- Design (by type)
- Engineering fundamentals
- Environmental engineering
- Flood frequency
- Floods
- Geomechanics
- Geotechnical engineering
- Hydraulic design
- Hydrologic engineering
- Hydrology
- Infiltration
- Meteorology
- Model accuracy
- Models (by type)
- Precipitation
- Rainfall
- Rainfall-runoff relationships
- Runoff
- Soil mechanics
- Soil properties
- Soil water
- Water and water resources
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