EGU21-6047, updated on 14 Sep 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-6047
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The influence of soil moisture conditions on the spatio-temporal variability of event rainfall-runoff coefficients in UK catchments

Yanchen Zheng1,2, Ross Woods2, Jianzhu Li1, and Ping Feng1
Yanchen Zheng et al.
  • 1Tianjin University, State Key Laboratory of Hydraulic Engineering Simulation and Safety, Tianjin, China (yanchenzheng@tju.edu.cn)
  • 2University of Bristol, Department of Civil Engineering, Bristol, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (aq20426@bristol.ac.uk)

Since the bias and uncertainties of the current design flood estimation methods for ungauged catchments are inevitable, estimation of the design flood in ungauged catchments still remains an unsolved problem. The derived distribution approach appears to be the one of the promising design flood estimation methods, as this method can improve the understanding on which processes contribute most to flood in ungauged catchments. Generally, the distribution of rainfall characteristics and lumped rainfall-runoff modelling was incorporated to estimate the flood magnitude in this method. However, we should note that rainfall is not the only driving factor of flood events. Soil moisture conditions are also an important driving factor affecting the rainfall-runoff transformation, and may even control rainfall-runoff coefficients to a higher degree than does rainfall. Hence, here we perform soil moisture analysis at national scale by employing GLDAS-Noah datasets, and link this to observed event runoff coefficients from a large sample of UK catchments. The relationship between soil moisture conditions and rainfall-runoff coefficient was explored to analyse the spatio-temporal variability of runoff coefficient. This study laid the foundation for further development of a practical derived distribution method, by considering the statistical distribution of rainfall-runoff coefficients and the influence of soil moisture conditions.

How to cite: Zheng, Y., Woods, R., Li, J., and Feng, P.: The influence of soil moisture conditions on the spatio-temporal variability of event rainfall-runoff coefficients in UK catchments, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-6047, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-6047, 2021.

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