SHETRAN and HEC HMS Model Evaluation for Runoff and Soil Moisture Simulation in the Jičinka River Catchment (Czech Republic)

Abstract

Due to the improvement of computation power, in recent decades considerable progress has been made in the development of complex hydrological models. On the other hand, simple conceptual models have also been advanced. Previous studies on rainfall–runoff models have shown that model performance depends very much on the model structure. The purpose of this study is to determine whether the use of a complex hydrological model leads to more accurate results or not and to analyze whether some model structures are more efficient than others. Different configurations of the two models of different complexity, the Système Hydrologique Européen TRANsport (SHETRAN) and Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS), were compared and evaluated in simulating flash flood runoff for the small (75.9 km2) Jičinka River catchment in the Czech Republic. The two models were compared with respect to runoff simulations at the catchment outlet and soil moisture simulations within the catchment. The results indicate that the more complex SHETRAN model outperforms the simpler HEC HMS model in case of runoff, but not for soil moisture. It can be concluded that the models with higher complexity do not necessarily provide better model performance, and that the reliability of hydrological model simulations can vary depending on the hydrological variable under consideration.

Adaptive Water Management-land Use Practice for Improving Ecosystem Services – a Hungarian Modelling Case Study

“…Generally, for catchments with at least moderate hillslope and with minimal or no groundwater feedback on surface processes, hydrological models can provide high precision simulations of runoff. For instance, for the small (75.9 km 2 ) and flashy (time of concentration is less than 1 hour for all sub-catchments) Jičinka River catchment [38] set up a lumped (HEC-HMS) and distributed parameter (SHETRAN) hydrologic model and reported NSME between 0.88 and 0.95 for calibration and NSME between 0.53 and 0.91 for validation events. For the same catchment Đukić et al [38,39] also presented that lumped and distributer parameter models can provide reasonable estimates also for soil moisture: both the cellbased maps and the catchment scale averages of simulated soil moisture showed good agreement with downscaled satellite data.…”

Land-use changes and precipitation cycles to understand hydrodynamic responses in semiarid Mediterranean karstic watersheds

“…Particularly, land-use changes are producing variations in the hydrological response with irreparable modification of the water cycle and increases in the maximum flow peaks during runoff events (Camarasa-Belmonte, 2016;Alonso-Sarría et al, 2016;Csáki et al, 2020;Sánchez-Galiano et al, 2017;Pardo et al, 2020). Nowadays, the application of remote sensing techniques (RS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) has propelled Earth observations, improving the identification and mapping of land use and respective changes (Petchprayoon et al, 2010;Nayeb-Yazdi et al, 2021;Đukic and Erić, 2021). Among those hydrological components involved after drastic land-use changes, the most relevant ones to achieve sustainable water management are related to the assessment of floods and water availability, since the variation of both factors could lead to significant modifications on the ecosystem services and human security (Jodar-Abellan et al, 2019;Lasanta et al, 2021).…”

“…This implementation is more common in detrital environments, while modeling hydrological processes in other conditions, such as karstic areas, remains limited currently (e.g. Moriasi et al, 2007;Candela et al, 2012;Azmat et al, 2018;Robineau et al, 2018;Ollivier et al, 2020;Đukic and Erić, 2021;Chen et al, 2021). The Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) model (Charley et al, 1995;Fleming and Brauer, 2018) is another appropriate well-known alternative for analysing the hydrological response sequentially and to examine the hydrological impact of the identified land-use changes (Gao et al, 2020;Fleming and Brauer, 2018;Mahmood and Jia, 2019).…”

“…HMS can be run with different computational time steps, according to the aim of the simulation and the representativeness of the short-time events in the study area (Jeong et al, 2010;Charley et al, 1995;Koneti et al, 2018;Azmat et al, 2018). HMS has been widely applied in uncalibrated basins with generally accurate results (Candela et al, 2012;Boongaling et al, 2018;Elaji and Ji, 2020;Đukic and Erić, 2021). To the best of our knowledge, however, it was not tested in arid karstic environments affected by drastic land-use and land cover changes.…”

Highly Resolved Runoff Path Simulation Based on Urban Surface Landscape Layout for Sub-Catchment Scale

“…Through simulating the distribution of potential runoff, the key areas to be transformed, the inlet and outlet of green space, can be identified. Diversion design can also be carried out at the intersection of surface runoff [13].…”