Semidistributed Hydrologic Model for Flood Risk Assessment in the Pejibaye River Basin, Costa Rica
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 17, Issue 12
Abstract
A semidistributed hydrologic model addressed to flood risk assessment is presented. The model has been applied and calibrated by means of a multistep calibration scheme to the Pejibaye River Basin in a series of flash flood events that occurred between 2006 and 2009. The model consists of a rainfall-runoff module, a surface runoff routing module (unit hydrograph method), a base flow module (linear reservoir method), and a channel-routing module. Two different unit hydrographs were contrasted and two different approaches (continuous and discrete) were used for average rainfall estimation. Model parameters were initially estimated by using classical formulation and documentation, and afterward were compared with calibrated parameters. The combination of the different unit hydrographs and average rainfall estimation procedures presented significantly different prediction errors. Rainfall-runoff and base flow methods showed a stable and reasonable behavior. Rainfall input was highlighted as a major source of error. However, the continuous method for average rainfall estimation was noted to slightly reduce timing errors as compared with the discrete method. Overall, the model reproduced reasonably the flash floods analyzed in this paper, both in calibration and validation ( between 0.81 and 0.87; Nash-Sutcliffe between 0.70 and 0.80), and therefore could be also suitable for other watersheds with similar climatic and geomorphologic conditions.
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Acknowledgments
This study has been made possible thanks to the funding support of the European Commission’s FP6 INCO-CT2004-510739 EPIC-FORCE (Evidence-based Policy for Integrated Control of Forested River Catchments in Extreme Rainfall and Snowmelt) project and the VIII Call of the Social Council of the UPM. We would like to thank the PRCR, ICE, and IMN of Costa Rica for their help and data supply, in particular Berny Fallas and Evelyn Quirós. We also thank Álvaro Muñoz Valcarce for English proofreading. Finally, we gratefully thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 17 • Issue 12 • December 2012
Pages: 1333 - 1344
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 28, 2011
Accepted: Jan 4, 2012
Published online: Jan 6, 2012
Published in print: Dec 1, 2012
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