A Modified SCS-CN Method Incorporating Storm Duration and Antecedent Soil Moisture Estimation for Runoff Prediction

Wenhai Shi, Mingbin Huang (), Kate Gongadze and Lianhai Wu
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Wenhai Shi: Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, CAS&MWR
Mingbin Huang: Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, CAS&MWR
Kate Gongadze: Rothamsted Research
Lianhai Wu: Rothamsted Research

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2017, vol. 31, issue 5, No 18, 1713-1727

Abstract: Abstract In one of the widely used methods to estimate surface runoff - Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN), the antecedent moisture condition (AMC) is categorized into three AMC levels causing irrational abrupt jumps in estimated runoff. A few improved SCS-CN methods have been developed to overcome several in-built inconsistencies in the soil moisture accounting (SMA) procedure that lies behind the SCS-CN method. However, these methods still inherit the structural inconsistency in the SMA procedure. In this study, a modified SCS-CN method was proposed based on the revised SMA procedure incorporating storm duration and a physical formulation for estimating antecedent soil moisture (V 0 ). The proposed formulation for V 0 estimation has shown a high degree of applicability in simulating the temporal pattern of soil moisture in the experimental plot. The modified method was calibrated and validated using a dataset of 189 storm-runoff events from two experimental watersheds in the Chinese Loess Plateau. The results indicated that the proposed method, which boosted the model efficiencies to 88% in both calibration and validation cases, performed better than the original SCS-CN and the Singh et al. (2015) method, a modified SCS-CN method based on SMA. The proposed method was then applied to a third watershed using the tabulated CN value and the parameters of the minimum infiltration rate (f c ) and coefficient (β) derived for the first two watersheds. The root mean square error between the measured and predicted runoff values was improved from 6 mm to 1 mm. Moreover, the parameter sensitivity analysis indicated that the potential maximum retention (S) parameter is the most sensitive, followed by f c . It can be concluded that the modified SCS-CN method, may predict surface runoff more accurately in the Chinese Loess Plateau.

Keywords: Soil moisture accounting; Soil conservation service curve number method; Loess plateau; Watershed (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1007/s11269-017-1610-0

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