No abstract

The NRCS-CN method is generally used to estimate effective rainfalls in a basin. However, since the curve number which plays a critical role in the NRCS-CN method was originally developed for US watersheds, it is limited to be directly applied to other basins outside the United States. Therefore various modifications have been suggested to revise the NRCS-CN for specific watershed condition. This study introduced the weighted average method and the slope-based CN to estimate effective rainfalls available for Korean watersheds and compared with the observed direct runoff. The overall results achieved from this study indicated that the adjusted slope-based CN considerably increases effective rainfalls in general and makes the duration of effective storm longer. Based on the statistical error analysis performed for various modifications of NRCS-CN, the weighted average method with the adjusted slope-based CN has highest precision with the observed direct runoff. In addition, after analyzing the relation between the initial loss estimated from rainfall-runoff observations and the potential maximum retention from GIS-based data, it turns out that the assumption of linear relationship between the initial loss and the potential maximum retention is not available for Korean watersheds.

No abstract

The mount of antecedent 5-day rainfall (P5) is usually used to determine the antecedent soil moisture condition for estimating effective rainfall using the NRCS-CN method. In order to re-establish the threshold of P5 considering basin characteristics, this study investigated the sensitivity of the threshold of P5 to effective rainfall by comparing the corresponding observed direct runoff. The overall results indicate that the direct runoff estimated using the re-establihed threshold of P5 has smaller mean error (RMSE of 27.3 mm) than those using the conventional threshold (RMSE of 35.2 mm). In addition, after evaluating the effectiveness of threshold of P5 using the improvement index, the threshold re-established in this study improved the ability to estimate the direct runoff by 30% on average. This study also suggested to employ regression models using topographic indices to re-establish the threshold for ungauged basins. When using the re-established threshold from the regression model, the RMSE decreased ranging from 0.4 mm to 15.1 mm and the efficiency index of Nash and Sutcliffe increased up to 0.33.