A new numerical model for simulating top surface soil moisture and runoff
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to construct a simplified distributed hydrological model based on the surveyed watershed soil properties database.
Design/methodology/approach
The new established model requires fewer parameters to be adjusted than needed by former hydrological models. However, the achieved stream-flow simulation results are similar and comparable to the classic hydrological models, such as the Xinanjiang model and the TOPMODEL.
Findings
Good results show that the discharge and the top surface soil moisture can be simultaneously simulated, and that is the exclusive character of this new model. The stream-flow simulation results from two moderate hydrological watershed models show that the daily stream-flow simulation achieved the classic hydrological results shown in the TOPMODEL and Xinanjiang model. The soil moisture validation results show that the modeled watershed scale surface soil moisture has general agreement with the obtained measurements, with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) value of 0.04 (m3/m3) for one of the one-measurement sites and an averaged RMSE of 0.08 (m3/m3) over all measurements.
Originality/value
In this paper, a new simplified distributed hydrological model was constructed.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant 40971024, the National Key Developing Program for Basic Sciences of China (Grant number 2006CB400502), and the 100 Young Talent Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (8-057493). The author would like to thank those at the Linyi Meteorological Bureau and Lv Xuemei for their kind help.
Citation
Chen, J. and Zhang, W.-c. (2018), "A new numerical model for simulating top surface soil moisture and runoff", Engineering Computations, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 1344-1363. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-01-2017-0031
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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