Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
1993, Journal of Hydrology
. Estimation of hydrological parameters at ungauged catchments. J. Hydrol., 143: 429-454. Estimates of hydrological parameters at ungauged sites have traditionally been obtained from regression equations. This study investigates alternative methods based on the classification of catchments into groups according to their flow regime, the assignment of ungauged catchments to a group based on physical characteristics of the catchment, and the use of similarity measures to transfer parameters from gauged to ungauged catchments. The paper considers the methods that can be adopted in this type of approach and the many variations that must be considered in their implementation. The methods are examined using a set of 99 catchments from the UK and are seen to be efficacious in estimating the unit hydrograph time to peak and standard percentage runoff, as defined by the UK Flood Studies Report.
Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Water Management, 2006
An important challenge for hydrologists is to develop a capability for predicting flow time-series in ungauged catchments, where historic flow records are not available to support model calibration. Using a database of 131 well-gauged UK catchments, this paper develops regression relationships between known catchment characteristics and parameters of a conceptual rainfall–runoff model. These relationships allow predictive models to be specified without calibration. In an attempt to improve the relevance of the relationships, the catchments are grouped into more and less permeable catchment types and regression equations are identified for each group separately. Also, equations more applicable to predicting high flows are identified separately to those more applicable to predicting low flows. Physically meaningful relationships between model parameters and catchment characteristics are generally absent. Despite this, results indicate that the best regression model improves the capabi...
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2007
The parameters of hydrological models for catchments with few or no discharge records can be estimated using regional information. One can assume that catchments with similar characteristics show a similar hydrological behaviour and thus can be modeled using similar model parameters. Therefore a regionalisation of the hydrological model parameters on the basis of catchment characteristics is plausible. However, due to the non-uniqueness of the rainfallrunoff model parameters (equifinality), a workflow of regional parameter estimation by model calibration and a subsequent fit of a regional function is not appropriate. In this paper a different approach for the transfer of entire parameter sets from one catchment to another is discussed. Parameter sets are considered as tranferable if the corresponding model performance (defined as the Nash-Sutclife efficiency) on the donor catchment is good and the regional statistics: means and variances of annual discharges estimated from catchment properties and annual climate statistics for the recipient catchment are well reproduced by the model. The methodology is applied to a set of 16 catchments in the German part of the Rhine catchments. Results show that the parameters transfered according to the above criteria perform well on the target catchments.
2002
The search for generalized theories to cope with the inherent spatial scale problem of hydrological prediction has been largely unsuccessful to date. The modelling of flow processes in catchments is hampered by this scale problem, and therefore results in poor predictions in the ubiquitous ungauged catchment (a catchment devoid of any streamflow measurements). Until now, observations of streamflow have been required to calibrate the rainfall–runoff models that are central to most strategies for hydrological prediction. In ungauged catchments other methods must be used. Catchment characteristics play a central role in this. The IAHS Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB) initiative aims at the development of science and technology to provide data and/or knowledge for ungauged or poorly gauged basins. The Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management (HWM) group of Wageningen University is very active in this field. In this paper some examples show how the group develops new measuring tec...
Water Resources Research, 2017
Hydrologic variability is a fundamental driver of ecological processes and species distribution patterns within river systems, yet the paucity of gauges in many catchments means that streamflow data are often unavailable for ecological survey sites. Filling this data gap is an important challenge in hydroecological research. To address this gap, we first test the ability to spatially extrapolate hydrologic metrics calculated from gauged streamflow data to ungauged sites as a function of stream distance and catchment area. Second, we examine the ability of statistical models to predict flow regime metrics based on climate and catchment physiographic variables. Our assessment focused on Australia's largest catchment, the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). We found that hydrologic metrics were predictable only between sites within 25 km of one another. Beyond this, correlations between sites declined quickly. We found less than 40% of fish survey sites from a recent basin-wide monitoring program (n 5 777 sites) to fall within this 25 km range, thereby greatly limiting the ability to utilize gauge data for direct spatial transposition of hydrologic metrics to biological survey sites. In contrast, statistical model-based transposition proved effective in predicting ecologically relevant aspects of the flow regime (including metrics describing central tendency, high-and low-flows intermittency, seasonality, and variability) across the entire gauge network (median R 2 0.54, range 0.39-0.94). Modeled hydrologic metrics thus offer a useful alternative to empirical data when examining biological survey data from ungauged sites. More widespread use of these statistical tools and modeled metrics could expand our understanding of flow-ecology relationships.
Environmental Modelling & Software, 1998
In order to model fluxes of water from the land surface to the atmosphere, and from one grid cell to another in climate models, predictions of hydrologic response are required for catchments where hydrologic data are not available. A methodology has been presented previously that has the capability of producing estimates of catchment scale hydrologic response for ungauged catchments on a daily timestep (Post and Jakeman, 1998, Ecol. Mod. submitted). In the present paper, it is demonstrated that these daily predictions of hydrologic response can be improved by incorporating information about the hydrologic response of the catchment on a longer timestep. This is because the influence of large scale phenomena such as climate and vegetation may produce a similar water yield in nearby catchments, even though their daily hydrologic response may be different, due for example, to differences in drainage density. Thus, the water yield of an ungauged catchment is inferred on an inter-annual timestep, and this information is used to balance the water budget of a daily timestep rainfall-runoff model. It was found that using tree stocking densities to predict water yields for small experimental catchments in the Maroondah region of Victoria produced better results than those obtained by inferring the water balance parameter of a daily timestep rainfall-runoff model from channel gradient and catchment elongation. Good predictions of inter-annual water yield were also obtained for small experimental catchments in the H. J. Andrews, Hubbard Brook, and Coweeta long term ecological research (LTER) sites in the United States, indicating that it may be possible to produce high quality predictions of daily hydrologic response for ungauged catchments in these regions also.
Civil Engineering Research Journal, 2019
Hydraulic designs in river engineering are composed of two main aspects such as flood estimation and channel sizing which are essential for safe flood conveyance. Prediction of runoff water in an ungauged catchment area is vital for various practical applications such as design of drainage structure, flood defenses, flood protection works, inflow forecasting and for catchment management tasks (say water allocation) and climate impact analysis. Almost all hydrologic analyses require one or more time-scale parameters as input. Out of this, time of concentration (tc) is the most frequently utilized time parameter [1]. However, modelers are often confused by the number of estimation methods of tC and often select a method without evaluating and comparing its accuracy with other methods [1,2]. For instance, the design of urban storm water drainage systems using the rational method requires an estimate of tc for selecting the design rainfall intensity from the Intensity-Duration-Frequency...
Considering the scarcity of water all over the world and need to estimate the same in an accurate manner, the present work was aimed to find a simple but effective method for estimation of catchment yield for independent catchment and a group of catchments as a whole. In this study, various hydro-meteorological data and catchment characteristics are used as the independent variables of catchment yield. Catchment characteristics data like drainage density, length of catchment, forest area percentage are obtained by the interpretation of aerial photographs by a simple table stereoscope. Hydro-meteorological data like rainfall, temperature and wind velocity data is collected from Tamilnadu Meteorological Department.
The objective of this assessment is to compare studies predicting runoff hydrographs in ungauged catchments. The aim is to learn from the differences and similarities between catchments in different locations, and to interpret the differences in performance in terms of the underlying climate and landscape controls. The assessment is performed at two levels. The Level 1 assessment is a metaanalysis of 34 studies reported in the literature involving 3874 catchments. The Level 2 assessment consists of a more focused and detailed analysis of individual basins from selected studies from Level 1 in terms of how the leave-one-out cross-validation performance depends on climate and catchment characteristics as well as on the chosen regionalisation method. The results indicate that runoff-hydrograph predictions in ungauged catchments tend to be more accurate in humid than in arid catchments and more accurate in large than in small catchments. The dependence of performance on elevation differs by regions and depends on how aridity varies with elevation and air temperature. The effect of the parameter regionalisation method on model performance differs between studies. However, there is a tendency towards a somewhat lower performance of regressions than other methods in those studies that apply different methods in the same region. In humid catchments spatial proximity and similarity methods perform best while in arid catchments similarity and parameter regression methods perform slightly better. For studies with a large number of catchments (dense stream gauge network) there is a tendency for spatial proximity and geostatistics to perform better than regression or regionalisation based on simple averaging of model parameters from gauged catchments. There was no clear relationship between predictive performance and the number of regionalised model parameters. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of model building.
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2009
Data scarcity and model over-parameterisation, leading to model equifinality and large prediction uncertainty, are common barriers to effective hydrological modelling. The problem can be alleviated by constraining the prior parameter space using parameter regionalisation. A common basis for regionalisation in the UK is the HOST database which provides estimates of hydrological indices for different soil classifications. In our study, Base Flow Index is estimated from the HOST database and the power of this index for constraining the parameter space is explored. The method is applied to a highly discretised distributed model of a 12.5 km 2 upland catchment in Wales. To assess probabilistic predictions against flow observations, a probabilistic version of the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency is derived. For six flow gauges with reliable data, this efficiency ranged between 0.70 and 0.81, and inspection of the results shows that the model explains the data well. Knowledge of how Base Flow Index and interception losses may change under future land use management interventions was then used to further condition the model. Two interventions are considered: afforestation of grazed areas, and soil degradation associated with increased grazing intensity. Afforestation leads to median reduction in modelled runoff volume of 24% over the simulated 3 month period; and a median peak flow reduction ranging from 12 to 15% over the six gauges for the largest simulated event. Uncertainty in all results is low compared to prior uncertainty and it is concluded that using Base Flow Index estimated from HOST is a simple and potentially powerful method of conditioning the parameter space under current and future land management.
In Greece the hydrological analysis of ephemeral streams has been especially difficult due to the lack of precipitation and discharge gauges. This study focuses on the investigation of possible relationship between morphometric characteristics of small to medium drainage basins and hydrological indices in order to discover morphometric parameters "predictors" of flash flood potential of ungauged catchments. Twenty-two morphometric parameters of twenty-seven drainage basins (ranging in area between 3.6 km 2 and 330.5 km 2 ) located in the northern part of the Peloponnese in southern Greece were calculated utilizing GIS software ArcGIS10. Hydrological modeling was performed using a simplified Matlab implementation of TOPMODEL, a conceptual model based on the principle of variable contributing area to runoff production through saturated overland flow, and LISEM, a physically based hydrologic and soil erosion model. Rainfall-runoff simulations were performed for an extreme precipitation event. The simulations outcomes, which include the peak discharge, time to peak and the percentage runoff, were correlated with the morphometric parameters of the catchments. Results were not consistent between the two models, probably due to their different structure, with the LISEM results being closer to what is anticipated. The results demonstrate that area, length of the basin, perimeter and compactness factor appear better correlated with the peak discharge (Qpeak) of the catchment. The same parameters as well as Melton's number correlate with percentage runoff (C), while "celerity" of the flood wave (length of the basin/time to peak) is better correlated with relief, indicating that as the relief becomes greater, the response of the basin becomes fastest.
IAHS-AISH publication, 2007
The paper presents a modification of a rainfall-runoff parameter regionalization procedure, which can be used for model parameter estimation in ungauged basins. The upper Hron River basin in Slovakia was selected as a study area. Data from 19 sub-catchments were collected and a lumped conceptual rainfall-runoff model was calibrated in each of them. The model accounts for snow accumulation, soil moisture and groundwater balance, and runoff generation in a daily time step and has 15 parameters to calibrate. The catchments were pooled into homogeneous groups with respect to selected physiographic catchment characteristics using non-hierarchic clustering. Multiple regression relationships between rainfall-runoff model parameters and physiographic catchment characteristics were sought separately within the pooled catchments groups. The performance of these was compared with the performance of such relationships derived for the entire Hron catchment. The performance of model parameter pre...
Hydrological Processes, 2007
A geomorphological instantaneous unit hydrograph (GIUH) is derived from the geomorphological characteristics of a catchment and it is related to the parameters of the Clark instantaneous unit hydrograph (IUH) model as well as the Nash IUH model for deriving its complete shape. The developed GIUH based Clark and Nash models are applied for simulation of the direct surface run-off (DSRO) hydrographs for ten rainfall-runoff events of the Ajay catchment up to the Sarath gauging site of eastern India. The geomorphological characteristics of the Ajay catchment are evaluated using the GIS package, Integrated Land and Water Information System (ILWIS). The performances of the GIUH based Clark and Nash models in simulating the DSRO hydrographs are compared with the Clark IUH model option of HEC-1 package and the Nash IUH model, using some commonly used objective functions. The DSRO hydrographs are computed with reasonable accuracy by the GIUH based Clark and Nash models, which simulate the DSRO hydrographs of the catchment considering it to be ungauged. Inter comparison of the performances of the GIUH based Clark and Nash models shows that the DSRO hydrographs are estimated with comparable accuracy by both the models. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper presents a framework for mapping flow information from the gauged to the ungauged river basins. The calibration and validation of a hydrologic model were conducted to establish basic watershed characteristics. The new framework was then applied to account for the two watersheds' proportionality in their similarity, such as the influence of land use on transplanting flow signatures. Three land-use scenarios-discharges at the ungauged and gauged sites formed the basis of an equation mapping the gauged discharge signal to the ungauged site. In comparison with intermittent observed data, the framework prediction attained a precision of 0.85≥NSE≤0.95, 0.80≥R2≤0.94, 0.56≥bR2≤0.89. Despite considerable differences in the watershed area, slope, soils, and land cover, the framework satisfactorily depicted the variation in flow pulses of each river. In the absence of established hydrological information, this provides an alternative flow estimation at ungauged sites, reducing u...
Open Journal of Modern Hydrology, 2023
This paper describes a framework for mapping flow information from a single gauge to the 9-ungauged river basins with distinct attributes. To establish the basic watershed characteristics at the gauged site, a hydrologic model was calibrated and validated against the historical continuous discharge dataset. The framework was then applied to account for the two watersheds' proportionality in their similarity, such as the influence of land use on transplanting flow signatures to the ungauged site. Three land-use scenarios-discharges at the ungauged and gauged sites formed the basis of an equation mapping the gauged discharge signal to the ungauged site. In comparison with intermittent observed data, the framework prediction attained a precision of 0.85 ≥ NSE ≤ 0.95, 0.80 ≥ R 2 ≤ 0.94, 0.56 ≥ bR 2 ≤ 0.89. Despite considerable differences in the watershed area, slope, soils, and land cover, the framework satisfactorily depicted the variation in flow pulses at each of the 9 ungauged discharge sites. In the absence of sufficient hydrological information, for example, the presence of a single gauge, the framework provides an alternative method to estimate flow at ungauged sites, reducing uncertainties in the regionalization of model parameters.
In hydrology a basic task is the estimation of design discharges and runoff changes in ungauged catchments. However, traditional empirical rules of thumb as well as regionalization of measured discharges are subject to uncertainty. It seems that precipitation-runoff modelling is the only comprehensible way to predict discharge alterations due to changes in ungauged basins, even though the results are perhaps not less uncertain. In order to minimize this uncertainty we supplemented a methodology for discharge estimation in ungauged basins by introducing runoff coefficients derived from field assessment, an adapted precipitation-runoff model (ZEMOKOST) and routines for a plausibility check. Subsequently ten gauged Austrian catchments were used as hypothetical ungauged catchments for application and verification of this method. Except for special questions in karst- and glacier-hydrology the procedure showed satisfying results. In addition, the approach has been tested in catchments that have been intensively impacted by human use in the last decades; in this regard variations in discharge and future runoff characteristics have been analyzed.
2013
Abstract The objective of this assessment is to compare studies predicting runoff hydrographs in ungauged catchments. The aim is to learn from the differences and similarities between catchments in different locations, and to interpret the differences in performance in terms of the underlying climate and landscape controls. The assessment is per-5 formed at two levels. The Level 1 assessment is a meta-analysis of 34 studies reported in the literature involving 3874 catchments.
Environmental Modelling & Software, 2012
Regionalization of rainfall-runoff models is required for many catchments, where a suitable flow record is not available to enable traditional calibration methods to be used. Most recently, donor catchment approaches have been identified as the most successful at providing suitable model parameter values. However, this approach is less attractive for regions where the number of suitable catchments available to derive model parameters is low. In this case, regression approaches that consider catchment characteristics available in GIS databases may be more appropriate. Approaches such as this have been criticized due to issues associated with the ability to identify suitable parameter values, as well as the approach used to predict them from catchment information, incorporating interactions between parameters. This study proposes a generic framework to enable systematic regression regionalization for a data poor region, considering identification of model parameters using a multi-objective approach, and sensitivity analysis including consideration of parameter interactions. The approach developed has been applied to both lumped and distributed models, in order to investigate the benefits of adopting distributed models to represent catchment heterogeneity. The results indicate that a suitable regression approach can be developed for the region considered, outperforming directly calibrated parameters on a validation period, due to more accurate representation of the recharge process. However, no benefit was found for applying the approach on a distributed scale, most likely due to scale issues with the parameter values.
Report to the National …, 2000
This project is carried out by the Centre for Environmental Applied Hydrology at the University of Melbourne as part of the National Land and Water Resources Audit Project 1 in Theme 1 (Water Availability). The objectives of the project are to extend unimpaired streamflow ...
2020
Streamflow data is important for studies of water resources and flood management, but an inherent problem is that many catchments of interest are ungauged. The lack of data is particularly the case for small catchments, where flow data with high temporal resolution is needed. This paper presents an analysis of regionalizing parameters of the Distance Distribution Dynamics (DDD) rainfall-runoff model for predicting hourly flows at small-ungauged rural catchments. The performance of the model with hourly time resolution has been evaluated (calibrated and validated) for 41 small gauged catchments in Norway (areas from 1 km–50 km). The model parameters needing regionalization have been regionalized using three different methods: multiple regression, physical similarity (single-donor and pooling-group based methods), and a combination of the two methods. Seven independent catchments, which are not used in the evaluation, are used for validation of the regionalization methods. All the thr...
Journal of Research in Engineering and Applied Sciences, 2017
Streamflow predictionin ungauged catchments is challenging. In this study we have applied hydrologically similar catchment modelling concept to predict streamflow from an ungauged catchment. Stormwater Management Model, EPASWMM was used to simulate the rainfall runoff process. First a model was set up for a nearby gauged catchment that was assumed hydrologically similar to the target ungauged catchment. The model was calibrated by using its gauged data. The calibrated model parameters were then used to set up the ungauged catchment model. The prediction of ungauged catchment model was verifiedwith the uniform runoff loss rate, "ɸ index" method and found similar values for both catchments. Further statistical analysis revealed that there is a strong temporal correlation in streamflow for both catchments. The developed ungauged catchment model can be used to study any post development scenario within the catchment. This paper provides a detail description of the modelling procedure.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.