Liuxihe Model and Its Modeling to River Basin Flood
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16, Issue 1
Abstract
Past research shows that physically based distributed hydrological model has the advantage of better representing the basin characteristics and the hydrologic processes to potentially simulate/predict river basin flood. But how to physically derive model parameters directly from terrain data and to acquire channel cross-sectional size are still difficult jobs in physically based distributed hydrological modeling that prevented its operational application in river basin flood forecasting. To deal with these challenges, this paper first presents a physically based, distributed hydrological model for river basin flood forecasting/simulation, called the Liuxihe model. Then a method for estimating channel cross-sectional size was proposed that utilizes a readily accessible public data set acquired by remote sensing techniques, which could be employed by other physically based, distributed hydrological models also. Finally, a method for deriving model parameters was proposed that adjusts model parameters with initial model parameters derived directly from terrain data that is completely different from parameter calibration in lumped model, which also can be used in other physically based, distributed hydrological models. A medium-sized river basin in southern China was tested with the above model and methods, and 13 collected flood events were simulated with reasonable model performances. It can be concluded that parameter adjustment is still necessary and vital to improve physically based, distributed hydrological performance as there is no systematic and global referencing in deriving model parameters from terrain data. For the Liuxihe model, the highly sensitive model parameter is water content at saturation condition; the sensitive parameters are water content at field condition, river channel Manning’s coefficient, soil thickness, soil porosity characteristics, soil hydraulic conductivity, and hillslope Manning’s coefficient; and the less sensitive parameters are potential evaporation, evaporation coefficient, underground water recession coefficient, and water content at wilting condition. The results also showed that the method proposed for estimating river channel cross-sectional size is reasonable and could be applied widely, and the proposed Liuxihe model works well in simulating river basin flood events, thus presenting further evidence of the potential use of the physically based distributed hydrologic model for the operational use of simulating/predicting river basin floods.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Funding Nos. NNSFC50479033 and NNSFC50179019), E.U. 5th Framework project (Contract No. UNSPECIFIEDEVK1-CT2002-00117), and the “985 Project” of GIS and Remote Sensing for Geosciences from the Ministry of Education of China (Contract No. UNSPECIFIED105203200400006). The writers thank the Liuxihe Reservoir Administration for providing the hydrologic data. Two anonymous reviewers are sincerely thanked for their comments which improved this paper and made it possible for publication.
References
Abbott, M. B., et al. (1986a). “An introduction to the European hydrologic system—System Hydrologue Europeen, ‘SHE’, a: History and philosophy of a physically-based, distributed modelling system.” J. Hydrol., 87, 45–59.
Abbott, M. B., et al. (1986b). “An introduction to the European hydrologic system—System Hydrologue Europeen, ‘SHE’, b: Structure of a physically based, distributed modeling system.” J. Hydrol., 87, 61–77.
Ambroise, B., Beven, K. J., and Freer, J. (1996). “Toward a generalization of the TOPMODEL concepts: Topographic indices of hydrologic similarity.” Water Resour. Res., 32(7), 2135–2145.
Andersen, J., Refsgaard, J. C., and Jensen, K. H. (2001). “Distributed hydrological modeling of the Senegal River Basin—Model construction and validation.” J. Hydrol., 247(1–4), 200–214.
Anderson, A. N., McBratney, A. B., and FitzPatric, K. E. (1996). “A soil mass, surface and spectral fractal dimensions estimated from thin section photographs.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 60, 962–969.
Arya, L. M., and Paris, J. F. (1981). “A physioempirical model to predict the soil moisture characteristic from particle-size distribution and bulk density data.” Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J., 45, 1023–1030.
Beven, K. J. (1996). “Equifinality and uncertainty in geomorphological modelling.” The scientific nature of geomorphology, B. L. Rhoads and C. E. Thorn, eds., Wiley, Chichester, U.K., 289–313.
Beven, K. J., and Kirkby, M. J. (1979). “A physically based variable contributing area model of catchment hydrology.” Hydrol. Sci. Bull., 24, 43–69.
Beven, K. J., Lamb, R., Quinn, P., Romanowicz, R., and Freer, J. (1995). “TOPMODEL.” Computer models of watershed hydrology, V. P. Singh, ed., Water Resource Publications, Littleton, Colo., 627–668.
Burnash, R. J. C. (1995). “The NWS river forecast system-catchment modeling.” Computer models of watershed hydrology, V. P. Singh, ed., Water Resource Publications, Littleton, Colo., 311–366.
Butts, M. B., et al. (2005). “Flexible process-based hydrological modelling framework for flood forecasting—MIKE SHE.” Proc., Int. Conf. Innovation, Advances and Implementation of Flood Forecasting Technology, HR Wallingford, Wallingford, U.K.
Butts, M. B., Payne, J. T., Kristensen, M., and Madsen, H., (2004). “An evaluation of the impact of model structure on hydrological modelling uncertainty for streamflow prediction.” J. Hydrol., 298, 242–266.
Campbell, G. S. (1974). “A simple method for determining unsaturated conductivity from moisture retention data.” Soil Sci., 117(6), 311–314.
Chen, Y. (2006). “Development of flood forecasting models for Guangzhou City flood decision support system.” Technical Rep., Sun Yat-Sen Univ., Guangzhou, China.
Crawford, N. H., and Linsley, R. K. (1966). “Digital simulation in hydrology, Stanford watershed model IV.” Tech. Rep. No. 39, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Stanford Univ., Stanford, Calif.
De Smedt, F., Liu, Y. B., and Gebremeskel, S. (2000). “Hydrologic modeling on a catchment scale using GIS and remote sensed land use information.” Risk analysis II, C. A. Brebbia, ed., WTI Press, Southampton, U.K./Boston, 295–304.
Du, J. K., Xie, S. P., Xu, Y. P., Xu, C. Y., and Singh, V. P. (2007). “Development and testing of a simple physically-based distributed rainfall-runoff model for storm runoff simulation in humid forested basins.” J. Hydrol., 336, 334–346.
Duan, Q., Sorooshian, S., and Gupta, V. K. (1992). “Effective and efficient global optimization for conceptual rainfall-runoff models.” Water Resour. Res., 28(4), 1015–1031.
Eckhardt, K., and Arnold, J. G. (2001). “Automatic calibration of a distributed catchment model.” J. Hydrol., 251, 103–109.
Freeze, R. A., and Harlan, R. L. (1969). “Blueprint for a physically-based, digitally simulated, hydrologic response model.” J. Hydrol., 9, 237–258.
Graham, D. N., and Butts, M. B. (2005). “Flexible, integrated watershed modelling with MIKE SHE.” Watershed models, V. P. Singh and D. K. Frevert, eds., CRC, Boca Raton, Fla., 245–272.
Jain, M. K., Kothyarib, U. C., and Ranga Raju, K. G. (2004). “A GIS based distributed rainfall-runoff model.” J. Hydrol., 299, 107–135.
Jensen, S. K., and Dominggue, J. O. (1988). “Extracting topographic structure from digital elevation data for geographic information system analysis.” Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sens., 54(11), 1593–1600.
Julien, P. Y., Saghafian, B., and Ogden, F. L. (1995). “Raster-based hydrologic modeling of spatially-varied surface runoff.” Water Resour. Bull., 31(3), 523–536.
Kouwen, N. (1988). “WATFLOOD: A micro-computer based flood forecasting system based on real-time weather radar.” Can. Water Resour. J., 13(1), 62–77.
Liang, X., Lettenmaier, D. P., Wood, E. F., and Burges, S. J. (1994). “A simple hydrologically based model of land surface water and energy fluxes for general circulation models.” J. Geophys. Res., 99(D7), 14415–14428.
Liu, H. (2001). Fluid mechanics, China Architecture and Building Press, Beijing.
Liu, Y. B., and De Smedt, F. (2004). WetSpa extension, a GIS-based hydrologic model for flood prediction and watershed management documentation and user manual, Free University of Brussels, Belgium.
Liu, Y. B., De Smedt, F., and Pfister, L. (2002). “Flood prediction with the WetSpa model on catchment scale.” Proc., Flood Defence 2002, B. Wu et al., eds., Science Press, New York, 499–507.
Madsen, H. (2003). “Parameter estimation in distributed hydrological catchment modelling using automatic calibration with multiple objectives.” Adv. Water Resour., 26, 205–216.
Madsen, H., Wilson, G., and Ammentorp, H. C. (2002). “Comparison of different automated strategies for calibration of rainfall-runoff models.” J. Hydrol., 261, 48–59.
Moore, I. D., Grayson, R. B., and Ladson, A. R. (1991). “Digital terrain modeling: A review of hydrological, geomorphologic and biological applications.” Hydrolog. Process., 5, 3–30.
O’Callaghan, J., and Mark, D. M. (1984). “The extraction of drainage networks from digital elevation data.” Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process., 28(3), 323–344.
Reed, S. M., et al. (2004). “Overall distributed model intercomparison project results.” J. Hydrol., 298(1–4), 27–60.
Refsgaard, J. C. (1997). “Parameterisation, calibration and validation of distributed hydrological models.” J. Hydrol., 198, 69–97.
Refsgaard, J. C., and Storm, B. (1995). “MIKE SHE.” Computer models of catchment hydrology, P. C. Miller, ed., Water Resources Publications, Littleton, Colo., 809–846.
Sherman, L. K. (1932). “Streamflow from rainfall by the unit-graph method.” Eng. News-Rec., 108, 501–505.
Smith, M. B., et al. (2004). “The distributed model intercomparison project (DMIP): Motivation and experiment design.” J. Hydrol., 298(1–4), 4–26.
Sugawara, M. (1995). “Tank model.” Computer models of watershed hydrology, V. P. Singh, ed., Water Resources Publications, Littleton, Colo., 165–214.
Thompson, J. R., Sorenson, H. R., Gavin, H., and Refsgaard, A. (2004). “Application of the coupled MIKE SHE/MIKE 11 modelling system to a lowland wet grassland in southeast England.” J. Hydrol., 293, 151–179.
Todini, E. (1996). “The ARNO rainfall-runoff model.” J. Hydrol., 175, 339–382.
Vieux, B. E., and Vieux, J. E. (2002). “VfloTM: A real-time distributed hydrologic model.” Proc., 2nd Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conf. (CD-ROM), Subcommittee on Hydrology (SOH), Interagency Advisory Committee on Water Data, Reston, Va.
Wang, Q. J. (1991). “The genetic algorithm and its application to calibrating conceptual rainfall-runoff models.” Water Resour. Res., 27(9), 2467–2471.
Wang, Z., Batelaan, O., and De Smedt, F. (1996). “A distributed model for water and energy transfer between soil, plants and atmosphere (WetSpa).” Phys. Chem. Earth, 21, 189–193.
Zaradny, H. (1993). Groundwater flow in saturated and unsaturated soil, Balkema, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 49–65.
Zhao, R. J. (1977). Flood forecasting method for humid regions of China, East China College of Hydraulic Engineering, Nanjing, China.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2011 ASCE.
History
Received: Apr 16, 2009
Accepted: Jun 18, 2010
Published online: Jun 22, 2010
Published in print: Jan 2011
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.