Comparison of modeling approaches for flood forecasting in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Comparison of modeling approaches for flood forecasting in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco El Mahdi El Khalki 1 & Yves Tramblay 2 & Mohamed El Mehdi Saidi 1 & Christophe Bouvier 2 & Lahoucine Hanich 3 & Mounia Benrhanem 4 & Meriem Alaouri 5 Received: 4 December 2017 / Accepted: 19 July 2018 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2018
Abstract In the Mediterranean region, floods are causing extended damages to the population and infrastructures. In Morocco, only a few studies have been conducted to understand flood processes while the vulnerability to floods is high. The goals of this study are to compare two modeling approaches for floods using either lumped or spatial rainfall and also to evaluate hydrological forecast capabilities. The Rheraya research catchment is characterized with steep slopes, altitudes ranging from 1027 to 4167 m, and a strong variability of rainfall. The lumped and distributed models provided similar results and reproduced well a sample of six flood events recorded in 2014. However, the distributed model provided the best estimation of the initial conditions, estimated from the ESA-CCI satellite soil moisture product and the Antecedent Precipitation Index. The validation of the lumped and the distributed models, using ESA-CCI to initialize the models, provides a Nash coefficient of 0.61 and 0.63 respectively. Then, two meteorological forecasts provided by the AROME and ALADIN models were evaluated against observed precipitation to provide a hydrological forecast. The AROME forecast performed better but still with a strong bias compared to observed precipitation. Further research is needed to link quantitative precipitation forecasts with hydrological models in this type of catchment. Keywords Flood modeling . AROME . ALADIN . ESA-CCI . Rheraya . High Atlas . Morocco
Introduction In the Mediterranean region, floods are the main natural hazard (Llasat et al. 2010). In particular, in North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), the vulnerability of the population is high and the rainfall events can be intense (Tramblay et al. 2013; Merheb et al. 2016). They can produce
* El Mahdi El Khalki [email protected] 1
Geosciences and Environment Laboratory, Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakesh, Morocco
2
HydroSciences Montpellier (IRD, CNRS, Univ. Montpellier), Montpellier, France
3
Georesources Laboratory - Associated to CNRST (URAC42), Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakesh, Morocco
4
Tensift Hydraulic Basin Agency, 40000 Marrakech, Morocco
5
The Department of National Meteorology (DMN), Casablanca, Morocco
flash flood events that cause several deaths (Argence et al. 2008; Douglas et al. 2008). This is notably the case of the Moroccan High Atlas Mountains (Saidi et al. 2003, 2013) where steep slopes and heavy rainfall events (Chaponnière et al. 2008; Zkhiri et al. 2017) are causing catastrophic flood damages, such as the 1995 event in the Ourika valley, with more than 200 deaths (Vinet et al. 2016a, b). The combination of these physiographic conditions with the increa
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