References

HESS

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

HESS

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

1607-7938

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/hess-16-4375-2012

Estimation of antecedent wetness conditions for flood modelling in northern Morocco

Tramblay

¹ Bouaicha

² Brocca

³ Dorigo

⁴ Bouvier

¹ Camici

³ Servat

IRD – UMR5569, Hydrosciences-Montpellier, Montpellier, France

Direction de la Recherche et de la Planification de l'Eau (DRPE), Rabat, Morocco

Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection, CNR, Perugia, Italy

Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

23 11 2012

16 11 4375 4386

2012

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The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/16/4375/2012/hess-16-4375-2012.pdf

In northern Morocco are located most of the dams and reservoirs of the country, while this region is affected by severe rainfall events causing floods. To improve the management of the water regulation structures, there is a need to develop rainfall–runoff models to both maximize the storage capacity and reduce the risks caused by floods. In this study, a model is developed to reproduce the flood events for a 655 km2 catchment located upstream of the 6th largest dam in Morocco. Constrained by data availability, a standard event-based model combining a SCS-CN (Soil Conservation Service Curve Number) loss model and a Clark unit hydrograph was developed for hourly discharge simulation using 16 flood events that occurred between 1984 and 2008. The model was found satisfactory to reproduce the runoff and the temporal evolution of floods, even with limited rainfall data. Several antecedent wetness conditions estimators for the catchment were compared with the initial condition of the model. Theses estimators include an antecedent discharge index, an antecedent precipitation index and a continuous daily soil moisture accounting model (SMA), based on precipitation and evapotranspiration. The SMA model performed the best to estimate the initial conditions of the event-based hydrological model (R2 = 0.9). Its daily output has been compared with ASCAT and AMSR-E remote sensing data products, which were both able to reproduce with accuracy the daily simulated soil moisture dynamics at the catchment scale. This same approach could be implemented in other catchments of this region for operational purposes. The results of this study suggest that remote sensing data are potentially useful to estimate the soil moisture conditions in the case of ungauged catchments in Northern Africa.

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