On the Calibration of the Parameters Governing the PWRI Distributed Hydrological Model for Flood Prediction

Abstract The Public Works Research Institute Distributed Hydrological (PWRI-DH) for flood modeling is a combination of the tank model and the kinematic wave method. In the PWRI-DH model, fitting the required parameters plays a fundamental role. The developers of the PWRI-DH model have introduced the capability of obtaining parameters automatically using the baseline parameters; however, the results are not always the expected results because they depend on several factors and must be calibrated manually. The last issue has limited the interest of researchers regarding in the usage of the PWRI-DH model. In this paper, we present a methodology to obtain the parameters required for the PWRI-DH model that enables to focusing only on the key parameters. First, a parametric study is performed by identifying the influence of each parameter in the discharge. From this study, we found that only four parameters play a fundamental role in the flood modeling using the PWRI-DH model. Five flood events in the Upper Aikawa River basin are used to calibrate the model. The results showed that the proposed methodology is suitable and improve the efficient on the flood simulation of Aikawa River and similar rivers, when using the PWRI-DH model.