Sub-Daily Simulation of Mountain Flood Processes Based on the Modified Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) Model

Yongchao Duan, Fanhao Meng, Tie Liu, Yue Huang, Min Luo, Wei Xing and Philippe De Maeyer
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Yongchao Duan: State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, China
Fanhao Meng: Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot 010022, China
Tie Liu: State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, China
Yue Huang: State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi 830011, China
Min Luo: Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot 010022, China
Wei Xing: University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
Philippe De Maeyer: Department of Geography, Ghent University, Ghent 9000, Belgium

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 17, 1-24

Abstract: Floods not only provide a large amount of water resources, but they also cause serious disasters. Although there have been numerous hydrological studies on flood processes, most of these investigations were based on rainfall-type floods in plain areas. Few studies have examined high temporal resolution snowmelt floods in high-altitude mountainous areas. The Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is a typical semi-distributed, hydrological model widely used in runoff and water quality simulations. The degree-day factor method used in SWAT utilizes only the average daily temperature as the criterion of snow melting and ignores the influence of accumulated temperature. Therefore, the influence of accumulated temperature on snowmelt was added by increasing the discriminating conditions of rain and snow, making that more suitable for the simulation of snowmelt processes in high-altitude mountainous areas. On the basis of the daily scale, the simulation of the flood process was modeled on an hourly scale. This research compared the results before and after the modification and revealed that the peak error decreased by 77% and the time error was reduced from ±11 h to ±1 h. This study provides an important reference for flood simulation and forecasting in mountainous areas.

Keywords: sub-daily; flood processes; accumulated temperature (AT); degree-day factor; SWAT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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