Runoff Estimation for the Central Region of the Lesser Zab River Watershed Using the SCS-Curve Number Method and GIS

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a hydrologic model for the central region (central catchments) located between Dokan and Al-Dibis dams in the Lesser Zab River (LZR) watershed, in Iraq. The hydrologic structure of the study area was prepared based on the DEM layer with 12.5 m spatial resolution by using the GIS environment, and then the HEC-HMS software was used for simulating the main hydrological processes like the infiltration losses, transformation, channel routing, and the baseflow contribution by using the SCS-CN, SCS-UH, Muskingum, and the Recession methods respectively. The corrections of the CN parameter due to the effects of the slope and initial abstraction were used and the resulting CN values for the entire LZR watershed were ranging from 56 to 100. This study concluded the effectivity of using the GIS environment and HEC-HMS software in the continuous rainfall-runoff modelling and achieved very good performance with R2 and NSE criteria of 0.9115 and 0.9 under the calibration phase, while 0.925 and 0.91 values were achieved for the same criteria under the validation phase respectively, also the CN was the most sensitive parameter in the proposed hydrologic model.

Keywords

• digital elevation model (dem)
• lesser zab river (lzr) watershed
• rainfall-runoff modelling
• scs-cn method
• gis
• hec-hms