Hydrology, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2015) – 3 articles , Pages 1-47

This study investigates the hydrology of Castle River in the southern Canadian Rocky Mountains. Temperature and precipitation data are analyzed regarding a climate trend between 1960 and 2010 and a general warming is identified. Observed streamflow has been declining in reaction to a decreasing snow cover and increasing evapotranspiration. To simulate the hydrological processes in the watershed, the physically based hydrological model WaSiM (Water Balance Simulation Model) is applied. Calibration and validation provide very accurate results and also the observed declining runoff trend can be reproduced with a slightly differing inclination. Besides climate change induced runoff variations, the impact of a vast wildfire in 2003 is analyzed. To determine burned areas a remote sensing method of differenced burn ratios is applied using Landsat data. The results show good agreement compared to observed fire perimeter areas. The impacts of the wildfires are evident in observed runoff data. They also result in a distinct decrease in model efficiency if not considered via an adapted model parameterization, taking into account the modified land cover characteristics for the burned area. Results in this study reveal (i) the necessity to establish specific land cover classes for burned areas; (ii) the relevance of climate and land cover change on the hydrological response of the Castle River watershed; and (iii) the sensitivity of the hydrological model to accurately simulate the hydrological behavior under varying boundary conditions. By these means, the presented methodological approach is considered robust to implement a scenario simulations framework for projecting the impacts of future climate and land cover change in the vulnerable region of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Full article

The ever-increasing availability of new remote sensing and land surface model datasets opens new opportunities for hydrologists to improve flood forecasting systems. The current study investigates the performance of two operational soil moisture (SM) products provided by the “EUMETSATSatellite Application Facility in Support of Operational Hydrology and Water Management” (H-SAF, http://hsaf.meteoam.it/) within a recently-developed hydrological model called the “simplified continuous rainfall-runoff model” (SCRRM) and the possibility of using such a model at an operational level. The model uses SM datasets derived from external sources (i.e., remote sensing and land surface models) as input for calculating the initial wetness conditions of the catchment prior to the flood event. Hydro-meteorological data from 35 Italian catchments ranging from 800 to 7400 km2 were used for the analysis for a total of 593 flood events. The results show that H-SAF operational products used within SCRRM satisfactorily reproduce the selected flood events, providing a median Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency index equal to 0.64 (SM-OBS-1) and 0.60 (SM-DAS-2), respectively. Given the results obtained along with the parsimony, the simplicity and independence of the model from continuously-recorded rainfall and evapotranspiration data, the study suggests that: (i) SM-OBS-1 and SM-DAS-2 contain useful information for flood modelling, which can be exploited in flood forecasting; and (ii) SCRRM is expected to be beneficial as a component of real-time flood forecasting systems in regions characterized by low data availability, where a continuous modelling approach can be problematic. Full article