Continental‐Scale River Flow Modeling of the Mississippi River Basin Using High‐Resolution NHD<i>Plus</i> Dataset

Tavakoly, Ahmad A.; Snow, Alan D.; David, Cédric H.; Follum, Michael L.; Maidment, David R.; Yang, Zong‐Liang

doi:10.1111/1752-1688.12456

Cited by 53 publications

(82 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(108 reference statements)

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“…() and Tavakoly et al . (), one such model is the light‐weight and computationally efficient RAPID river routing model which has been implemented, among other domains, over the Texas Gulf Coast and Mississippi River basins. The development of these models has presented an opportunity to systematically link atmospheric and land surface processes, over large domains, to catchment scale hydrologic and hydraulic processes.…”

Section: Existing Forecasting and Modeling Capabilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Real‐Time Continental Scale Streamflow Simulation in Continuous and Discrete Space

Salas

Somos‐Valenzuela

Dugger

et al. 2017

J American Water Resour Assoc

Self Cite

103

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The National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts floods at approximately 3,600 locations across the United States (U.S.). However, the river network, as defined by the 1:100,000 scale National Hydrography Dataset-Plus (NHDPlus) dataset, consists of 2.7 million river segments. Through the National Flood Interoperability Experiment, a continental scale streamflow simulation and forecast system was implemented and continuously operated through the summer of 2015. This system leveraged the WRF-Hydro framework, initialized on a 3-km grid, the Routing Application for the Parallel Computation of Discharge river routing model, operating on the NHDPlus, and real-time atmospheric forcing to continuously forecast streamflow. Although this system produced forecasts, this paper presents a study of the three-month nowcast to demonstrate the capacity to seamlessly predict reach scale streamflow at the continental scale. In addition, this paper evaluates the impact of reservoirs, through a case study in Texas. Validation of the uncalibrated model using observed hourly streamflow at 5,701 U.S. Geological Survey gages shows 26% demonstrate PBias ≤ |25%|, 11% demonstrate Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) ≥ 0.25, and 6% demonstrate both PBias ≤ |25%| and NSE ≥ 0.25. When evaluating the impact of reservoirs, the analysis shows when reservoirs are included, NSE ≥ 0.25 for 56% of the gages downstream while NSE ≥ 0.25 for 11% when they are not. The results presented here provide a benchmark for the evolving hydrology program within the NWS and supports their efforts to develop a reach scale flood forecasting system for the country.(KEY TERMS: continental scale river dynamics; streamflow prediction; surface water hydrology; flood forecasting.)

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Section: Existing Forecasting and Modeling Capabilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Real‐Time Continental Scale Streamflow Simulation in Continuous and Discrete Space

Salas

Somos‐Valenzuela

Dugger

et al. 2017

J American Water Resour Assoc

Self Cite

103

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“…Using parallel computing, the flow can be simulated quickly throughout a basin with a high density of stream segments. RAPID has been implemented for regions of varying scales including France (David et al ., ), the San Antonio and Guadalupe basins in Texas (David et al ., ; Tavakoly et al ., ), the Texas Gulf Coast region (David et al ., ), and the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) (Tavakoly et al ., ). Tavakoly et al .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Tavakoly et al . () found that RAPID can be deployed with reasonable accuracy over the entire MRB when major dam operations are included, but the results are more accurate in the more humid eastern part of the MRB. However, RAPID only simulates the flow rate within each reach; it does not simulate flood inundation area.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

AutoRAPID: A Model for Prompt Streamflow Estimation and Flood Inundation Mapping over Regional to Continental Extents

Follum

Tavakoly

Niemann

et al. 2016

J American Water Resour Assoc

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This article couples two existing models to quickly generate flow and flood‐inundation estimates at high resolutions over large spatial extents for use in emergency response situations. Input data are gridded runoff values from a climate model, which are used by the Routing Application for Parallel computatIon of Discharge (RAPID) model to simulate flow rates within a vector river network. Peak flows in each river reach are then supplied to the AutoRoute model, which produces raster flood inundation maps. The coupled tool (AutoRAPID) is tested for the June 2008 floods in the Midwest and the April‐June 2011 floods in the Mississippi Delta. RAPID was implemented from 2005 to 2014 for the entire Mississippi River Basin (1.2 million river reaches) in approximately 45 min. Discretizing a 230,000‐km2 area in the Midwest and a 109,500‐km2 area in the Mississippi Delta into thirty‐nine 1° by 1° tiles, AutoRoute simulated a high‐resolution (~10 m) flood inundation map in 20 min for each tile. The hydrographs simulated by RAPID are found to perform better in reaches without influences from unrepresented dams and without backwater effects. Flood inundation maps using the RAPID peak flows vary in accuracy with F‐statistic values between 38.1 and 90.9%. Better performance is observed in regions with more accurate peak flows from RAPID and moderate to high topographic relief.

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“…The estimation of these parameters is explained in [1] and [4] and the estimated values can be improved through optimization. Examples of possible cost functions that can be used to optimize these parameters are found in [1] [3] and [5]. The second routing component we evaluate in this study is the one implemented in the Hillslope-Link hydrologic Model (HLM) developed and used by the Iowa Flood Center (IFC).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This routing component is nonlinear and accounts for the momentum equation in a simplified form ( [6] [7] and [8]), and the stream velocity is determined based on the nonlinear relationship between the discharge and the served area ( [9] [10]). Similar to [1] [11] and [5] we do not account in this study for lateral flows to the channel in our calculation for the sake of simplicity and since our sub-catchment sizes are small. This means we assume the runoff depth immediately enters the streams in their corresponding upstream junctions before the channel routing takes place.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Time-Based Framework for Evaluating Hydrologic Routing Methodologies Using Wavelet Transform

ElSaadani¹,

Krajewski²

2017

JWARP

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In this study we explore a method which provides an insight into the effectiveness of various hydrologic models' routing components based on their ability to accurately represent flood peak times and shapes. The method is based on using Cross-Wavelet Transforms to estimate the phase (time) difference between the time series of the observed and the simulated discharges. In this article we evaluate two routing components, the Routing Application for Parallel Computation of Discharge (RAPID), which is based on the simplified Muskingum routing method, and the routing component of the nonlinear Hillslope-Link hydrologic Model (HLM) produced in the Iowa Flood Center (IFC). Both routing components are driven by the same source of runoff and used the same channel network to ensure that the discrepancies between the simulated stream discharges are due to channel routing alone. We also explore the suitability of different wavelet shapes for our application, and how the difference in wavelet shape can affect our evaluation results. Unlike the conventional statistical skill scores used to evaluate model performance (e.g. Root Mean Squared Error, correlation coefficient, and Nash Sutcliff efficiency index), which give an estimate of the overall hydrograph performance, our method conveniently provides time-localized information with higher resolution at peak location. We perform our evaluation at multiple stream gauge locations, covering a wide range of scales (700 to 16,862 km 2 ), located in the eastern part of the state of Iowa. Our results show that the proposed wavelet method is effective in evaluating the performance of the routing components in simulating peak times across spatial scales. Generally, the non-linear routing method employed in the HLM outperformed the Muskingum based method employed in RAPID. In addition, our results suggest that the Paul wavelet is more effective in detecting and separating individual peaks than the Morlet wavelet, which in turn leads to a more accurate evaluation of the routing components.

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Continental‐Scale River Flow Modeling of the Mississippi River Basin Using High‐Resolution NHDPlus Dataset

Cited by 53 publications

References 62 publications

Towards Real‐Time Continental Scale Streamflow Simulation in Continuous and Discrete Space

Towards Real‐Time Continental Scale Streamflow Simulation in Continuous and Discrete Space

AutoRAPID: A Model for Prompt Streamflow Estimation and Flood Inundation Mapping over Regional to Continental Extents

A Time-Based Framework for Evaluating Hydrologic Routing Methodologies Using Wavelet Transform

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