Influence of the spatial variability of rainfall on hydrograph modelling at catchment outlet: a case study in the Cevennes region, France

The influence of rainfall spatial variability on hydrographs modelling at catchment outlet remains an open scientific debate. Emmanuel et al. (2015) have proposed rainfall variability indexes aiming at summarising the influence of rainfall spatial organisation on hydrographs features. This preliminary work was based on a large simulated database. The present article shows how the proposed indexes may be used in a real case study to discriminate rainfall events for which information on spatial rainfall organization is crucial for hydrograph modelling, and therefore to better illustrate the added value of high resolution rainfall information as input of hydrological models. The presented case study is located in the Cevennes Region in south-eastern France. The tested flow events are split into two subsets according to the values of the rainfall variability indexes. The comparison between modelled and measured hydrographs is then performed separately for each subset. The results obtained suggest that, on average, modelling results taking into account high resolution rainfall data are significantly improved for the subset for which the influence of rainfall variability is expected to be significant according to the indexes values. Although limited to a relatively small number of hydrographs, this case study can be viewed as a first confirmation of the pertinence of the rainfall variability indexes proposed in Emmanuel et al. (2015) to investigate the influence of rainfall spatial variability on the shape of hydrographs at catchment outlet.