Ecology, Environment and Conservation Paper

RAINFALL-RUNOFF MODELING USING REMOTELY SENSED DATA AND THE HYDROLOGIC MODELING SYSTEM (HEC-HMS)

Hossein Sahour, Ahmad Mokhtari and Sina Shahabi Ghahfarokhi

Abstract

Floods are amongst the most destructive natural hazards cause lots of economic damages and casualties. Advancements in Remote Sensing and computer sciences provide a great opportunity for researchers to implement flood prediction systems to mitigate devastating impacts of flood events. In the following research, total outflow, peak flow and time to peak for runoff within the Siahroud watershed in Mazandaran, a northern province of Iran, has been simulated using remote sensing, GIS and The Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS). For this reason, Basin model has been extracted from DEM in GIS as an import data for HEC-HMS model. In order to estimate Curve Number (CN), Land Use and Land Cover data extracted from Landsat 8 OLI using object-based classification method were combined with Soil Hydrological groups. In the next step, time series data include hydrologic and rainfall data from six floods events were added to the modeling software. These six events were divided in two groups. Three events used for calibration of the model and three other events for validation. Validation results showed a good correlation for peak flow and time to peak in observed and simulated hydrographs while the difference between observed and computed outflow in two events revealed a limitation in simulation of total discharge.