Reconstruction of the hazardous flood of 2014 in Magadan city based on coupled hydrometeorological modelling

Abstract

The study assessed the possibility of using a deterministic distributed hydrological model Hydrograph to calculate the maximum discharge of catastrophic flood at the Magadanka River (48.5 km2, city of Magadan, North-East of Russia) in 2014. The model parameters were not calibrated but borrowed from previously performed regional modelling studies. To verify the Hydrograph model streamflow simulations with daily time step were carried out for the period 1971-2015. The median value of Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency was 0.42 for a period of 44 years, which, given the lack of a meteorological station within the catchment, made it possible to evaluate the results as satisfactory. For the catastrophic flood calculation, two types of precipitation data were used: hourly data on precipitation from the nearest weather station and distribution of precipitation for the watershed from the meteorological model WRF. The flood hydrographs were estimated for the initial and corrected sets of the model parameters. The initial set of the model parameters allowed for proper timing of the flood peak but underestimated “observed” maximum value. We introduced the decreasing correction coefficient to the infiltration parameter of the model to “stretch out” the peak and volume of hydrographs. The results have shown that combining the meteorological input from weather station and regional meteorological model may allow for successful flood simulations in ensemble mode.