General and Analytic Unit Hydrograph and Its Applications
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 27, Issue 2
Abstract
Unit hydrograph (UH) is widely used for predictions of flood hydrograph from a known storm. Its concept and theory are simple and straightforward, but its practical applications are cumbersome because it is discrete and inflexible for different rainfall durations. An internet search indicates that though Nash’s gamma function is widely accepted as a theoretical model, it is not a true form of instantaneous UH. Briefly, a simple, general, and analytic model for UH has not been found in the literature, which forms the objective of this research. To this end, we first make three hypotheses on instantaneous UH based on empirical observations; we next find a general unit-volume hydrograph for S-hydrograph that leads to analytic expressions for interval and instantaneous unit-volume hydrographs; we then apply the proposed method to simplify applications of the Soil Conservation Society (SCS) dimensionless UH. After that, we examine the proposed method with real-world data. We confirmed that the proposed general and analytic UH predicts flood hydrograph simply and accurately, and it agrees with data better than the classic Nash instantaneous UH model.
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Data Availability Statement
All Matlab codes (Figs. S1 –S4 ) that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon request.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Professor Clark C. K. Liu at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Professor Chang-Chun Chen at the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, China for providing information on Professor Wan-Li Huang’s fundamental contributions to the evolution of the instantaneous unit hydrograph. The author also appreciates the constructive comments offered by the three anonymous reviewers, the associate editor, and the editor, which have significantly improved this paper during its preparation.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 27 • Issue 2 • February 2022
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 6, 2021
Accepted: Sep 21, 2021
Published online: Nov 24, 2021
Published in print: Feb 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Apr 24, 2022
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