An approach for flood assessment by numerical modeling of extreme hydrological events in the Zat watershed (High Atlas, Morocco)

ABSTRACT

Arid and semi-arid areas are often subject to sudden and flash floods, causing extended damages to the population and infrastructures. This paper presents a method for flood assessment in the Zat watershed (sub basin of the Tensift catchment) via 10-minute numerical modeling using the HEC-HMS numerical model. To illustrate the calibration and the validation process four flood events recorded during (2011-2014) were used and two different validation methods were adopted. The comparative analysis of simulation results obtained during the calibration and validation showed a good compliance with measured data. A Nash-Sutcliff of 82.38% on average over the four events, and an R² of 0.65 are considered as satisfactory results for the correlation between the initial soil moisture conditions and the Curve Number. As part of the future steps, this approach could be extrapolated to other watersheds with similar contexts, both in Morocco and in other Mediterranean regions

KEYWORDS:

• Flood modeling
• peak discharge
• rainfall-runoff model
• initial soil moisture conditions
• HEC-HMS
• Zat watershed

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).