Impact of initial soil moisture on the hydrological response: Application for flood forecasting in the Mediterranean mountainous watershed.

Mediterranean mountainous regions are strongly affected by flash flood events causing many damages. The vulnerability to flooding in the Moroccan High Atlas, especially in the Tensift basin, has been increasing over the last decades. Rainfall-runoff models can be very useful for flash flood forecasting. However, event-based models require a reduction of their uncertainties related to the estimation of initial moisture conditions before a flood event. Soil moisture may strongly modulate the magnitude of floods and is thus a critical parameter to be considered in flood modeling.

Indeed, several studies have assimilated satellite soil moisture observations into rainfall-runoff models to improve their flood forecasting capabilities.

In order to have a better representation of the watershed states which leads to a better estimation of the streamflow. By exploiting the strong physical connection between soil moisture dynamics and precipitation, it has been shown that satellite soil moisture observations can also be used to improve the quality of precipitation observations.

The aim of this study is to compare daily soil moisture measurements obtained by time domain reflectometry (TDR) at Sidi Rahal station with satellite soil moisture products (European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative, ESA-CCI), in order to estimate the initial soil moisture conditions for each event. The systematic bias between soil moisture products and in situ measurements was corrected using a bias correction method. The correlations between soil moisture products and in situ observations are about 0.77 after the correction.  

However, a modeling approach based on rainfall-runoff observations of 30 sample flood events have been applied, from (2011 to 2018), in the Ghdat basin were extracted and modeled by an event-based rainfall-runoff model (HEC-HMS) which is based on the Soil Conservation Service (SCS-CN), loss model, and a Clark unit hydrograph was developed for simulation and calibration of the 10-minute rainfall runoff.

A similar approach could be implemented in other watersheds in this region for further operational purposes. This method is very satisfactory for reproducing rainfall-runoff events in this small Mediterranean mountainous watershed, the same approach could be implemented in other watersheds in this region. The results of this study indicate that the remote sensing data are theoretically useful for estimating soil moisture conditions in data-sparse watersheds in arid Mediterranean regions.

Keywords: Soil moisture; Floods; Remote sensing; Hydrological modelling, CN method, Mediterranean basin.