Abstract
Flash floods, particularly in Mediterranean regions, are a rare but destructive event, and difficult to forecast. This difficulty is due to the high rainfall intensities and total amount, the high spatial variability of rainfall, the short response time of small watershed, but also to the lack of observations during these events. Moreover, the presence of karstic terrains on the basin leads to complex and unknown interactions between the surface flood and the underground system. In this study, we calibrated radar rainfall by a known global method and a new distributed one. We used these data in a conceptual distributed model to simulate floods. The simulations results showed that the distributed method is the most accurate way to correct radar data; however the global method led to higher performances of the model. This may be due to the globalization of production parameters on the watershed, which does not represent the karst influence on surface floods. This influence seems to be significant since the piezometric level in the karst was the best indicator to initialize the model.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bailly-Comte V (2008) Interactions hydrodynamiques surface/souterrain en milieu karstique. Thèse de doctorat de l’Université Montpellier 2, 288 pp
Berne A, Krajewski W-F (2013) Radar for hydrology : unfulfilled promise or unrecognized potential? Adv Water Resour 51:357–366
Coustau M, Bouvier C, Borrell-Estupina V, Jourde H (2012) Flood modelling with a distributed event-based parsimonious rainfall-runoff model: case of the karstic Lez river catchment. Nat Hazards Earth Syst Sci 12:1119–1133
Doglioni A, Simeone V, Giustolisi O (2012) The activation of ephemeral streams in karst catchments of semi-arid regions. Catena 99:54–65
Dörfliger N, Fleury P, Ladouche B (2008) Inverse modeling approach to allogenic karst system characterization. Ground Water 47(3):414–426
Harader E, Borrell Estupina V, Ricci S, Coustau M, Thual O, Piacentini A, Bouvier C (2012) Correcting the radar rainfall forcing of a hydrological model with data assimilation: application to flood forecasting in the Lez catchment in Southern France. Hydrol Earth Syst Sci 16:1–18
Nou A (2012) Approche interdisciplinaire pour l’estimation de la ressource en eau d’origine karstique : application a l’hydrosysteme karstique tertiaire Cesse-Pouzols (France, Minervois). Thèse de doctorat de l’Université Montpellier 1, 282 pp
Vieux B-E, Bedient P-B (2004) Assessing urban hydrologic prediction accuracy through event reconstitution. J Hydrol 29:217–236
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the SPCMO, Meteo France, the SCHAPI and the CG-Aude for respectively discharge and radar data, rain gauge rainfall, SIM Hu2, and piezometric level. Reviewer is also thanked for relevant comments permitting improvement of the paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Raynaud, F., Borrell-Estupina, V., Dezetter, A., Pistre, S., Mathieu-Subias, H., Servat, E. (2015). Modelling Flash Floods in a Karstic Watershed Using an Original Semi-distributed Radar-Gauge Merging Method. In: Lollino, G., Arattano, M., Rinaldi, M., Giustolisi, O., Marechal, JC., Grant, G. (eds) Engineering Geology for Society and Territory - Volume 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09054-2_34
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09054-2_34
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-09053-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-09054-2
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)