Rainfall-runoff simulations in the Lukovska River Basin with the HEC-HMS model

Abstract

Hydrologic models are important for effective water resources management at a basin level. This paper describes an application of the HEC-HMS hydrologic model for simulations of flood hydrographs in the Lukovska River basin. Five flood events observed at the Merćez stream gauge were available for modelling purposes. These events are from two distinct periods and two seasons with different prevailing runoff generation mechanisms. Hence the events are assigned to either “present” or “past”, and “spring” or “summer” group. The optimal parameter sets of each group are obtained by averaging the optimal parameters for individual events within the group. To assess model transferability, its applicability for simulation of flood events which are not considered in the model calibration, a cross-validation is performed. The results indicate that model parameters vary across the events, and that parameter transfer generally leads to considerable errors in hydrograph peaks and volumes, with the exception of simulation of summer events with “spring” parameters. Based on these results, recommendations for event-based modeling are given.

Keywords

• calibration
• flood events
• hydrologic models transferability
• HEC-HMS
• event-based modeling