REEL ete ere eri eae, Bau 143 Integrating a physically based hydrological model with GRASS S. CHAIRAT & J. W. DELLEUR ‘School of Civil Engineering, Csi Engineering Building, Purdue University, West Lafyet, Indiana 47906-1284, USA [Abstract A procedure to integrate TOPMODEL with GRASS is deseribed here. ‘The Geographic Information System, GRASS, is used for hydrological parameter determination, hydrologic assessments and to lnk the hydrological medel. A small sgricultural catchment (3.38 km?) is used forthe preliminary simulations. INTRODUCTION ‘The understanding and prediction of catchment response to rainfall through the several flow paths is an important part of water resources management ard it is of practical interest in the estimation of flood events. A new trend of thought in hydrology has focused on the determination of the interactions of catchment geomorphology with spatial heterogeneity in watersheds. Thus, various researchers have attempted to explain the complexity of runoff production processes that arises from the spatial heterogeneity in topography, soil characteristics, soil type, vegetation covers and antecedent soil conditions Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) are computer based systems that provide very powerful data management facilities for handling spatial databases. With the increasing availability of these softwares, the task of manually dealing with large quantities of data is made easier. Further, GIS provide convenient analysis functions to maintain and analyze spatial and attribute data, integrate information, and display output in tabular and map format. Thus, the availability of GIS is an effective and convenient tool for hydrologists to study the spatially distributed basin characteristics and their influence on runoff generation. This paper describes the procedure adopted to integrate a physically based hydrological model and a Geographic Information System. The topography based hydrology model is TOPMODEL, presented by Beven & Kirby (1979). The Geographic Information System used in this study is the Geographical Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS), developed by the Corps of Enginzers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. The Integration of TOPMODEL with GRASS provides a powerful tool for a better understanding of hillslope runoff production within the catchment and for investigating the influence of soil variability on runoff generation, as well as for incorporating the geomorphological characteristics and their impacts on catchment responses. ‘The product being developed uses GRASS as a platform to operate144 S. Chairat & J.W. Delleur TOPMODEL, using the GIS to create, manage, manipulate, analyze and display TOPMODEL's input and output. Several tools are created to assist the data preparation and the interface. MODEL CONCEPT ‘A physically based topography model, referred to as TOPMODEL, is used to late the catchment response. This section presents a simplified description of the model based on the extended version of TOPMODEL theory given by Beven & Wood (1983) and Beven (1986). TOPMODEL conceptualizes the soil water storage as a sequence of storages with different properties. First the interception store is filled to its ‘maximum capacity before any water can infiltrate to the infiltration store. A leakage takes place at a constant rate from this store to the saturation store. ‘This letter store is nonlinear and an exponential relationship between the subsurface outflow and the storage is assumed. A vertical drainage is allowed from the infiltration store to recharge the saturation store. Evaporation losses are allowed from these storages. Two types of dischargeable outflows are contributed to the stream runoff. A delayed flow component is supplied by the saturated zone as the baseflow, and a quick flow component is given by the contributing areas and by excess infiltration. TOPMODEL is an event-oriented model that predicts the catchment responses following one or a series of rainfall events. Further, it maintains a continued accounting of the storage deficits allowing the identification of the saturated source areas within the basin. This is obtained by combining the spatial variability of topography and soil characteristics. A brief description of this relationship is given here. The subsurface flow rate per unit width of contour length, qj, at any point on the hillslope is approximated by (Beven et al., 1984: Beven & Wood 1983; Beven, 1986; Sivapalan et al., 1987) Ss a= Tj tan Bj exp(- m a where T; is the soil transmissivity, B; is the slope angle, S; is the local storage deficit, and m is used to describe the change in transmissivity with depth. Based on this exponential approximation the local deficit is derived as (Beven, 1986): @)Integrating a physically based hydrological model with GRASS 145 where S is the average storage deficit, In (a/tanB) is the topographic index, a is the cumulative area drained through a unit length of contour line, and y is the area weighted topographic and soil index defined as: wets In(—— ) aa @ Equation 2 is used to predict the saturated contributing areas at each time step. A. negative value of Sj indicates that the area is saturated and saturation overland flow is generated. During the simulation, the mean storage deficit is, updated at each time step, and the base flow is determined. Further, the ribution of the saturation zone depends on the topographic index and the value of T; ‘The model is applied to each of the subcatchments, obtained by dividing the catchment into smaller areas based on the channel network. The flow is then routed to the outlet based on the assumption of constant kinematic wave velocity. WATERSHED DESCRIPTION ‘The study catchment is located in a field station for interdisciplinary studies near West Lafayette, Indiana, named the Indian Pine Natural Resources Field Station (Fig. 1). The field station encompasses two major watersheds and several small catchments. The larger watersheds are located along the two ‘major creeks draining to the Wabash River. The Indian Creek watersheé has drainage area of 67 km? and the Little Pine watershed includes 139.6 km?. ‘The study area used for the preliminary analysis is located at the head of, the Little Pine watershed with a drainage area of 3.38 km?, It is observed that the soil types are primarily silt loams and silty clay loams. The study area is predominately agricultural covered with pasture and corn. The area is flat in the upper part of the catchment and gets steeper along the main stream near the channel outlet. The slopes vary from 1% to 14% at the outlet. DATA REQUIREMENTS ‘Two types of parameters are required for TOPMODEL: physical parameters and hydrological parameters. The physical parameters include the area of the subcatchments, channel network, stream lengths, slopes, elevation, aspect, and the upslope contributing areas from which the flow drains into a given poi146 S. Chairat & J.W. Delleur Fig. 1 Catchment location, The hydrological parameters include the infiltration parameters, interception storage specifying the volume to be filled before flow enters the subsurface storages, rainfall events, evapotranspiration, hydrological properties of the soil and type of land cover. Inthis study, the data required are divided into two types of input files. ‘The first type of data input is provided by GRASS. These files provide the spatial and relational data describing the watershed characteristics. The second type of input provides the initial conditions and the temporal events (rainfall, discharges and evaporation). A detailed description of this process is given in the following section. INTEGRATION PROCEDURE ‘The linkage procedure of TOPMODEL and GRASS is made at three levels. ‘The first level corresponds to using GRASS tools for hydrological parameters determination. The second level consists of adapting the file formats for input and output to and from the hydrological model. The last step consists of TOPMODEL simulations. A schematic diagram of the integration procedure and the flow of information from one level to the other is shown in Fig. 2.Integrating a physically based hydrological model with GRASS 147 INTERMEDIATE cis ANALYSIS PROCESSES MODEL ANALYSIS. SPATIAL DATA INPUT 1 | ani ae Sf puncrons Fig. 2 Schematic diagram of the integration procedure of TOPMODEL on GRASS. GIS analysis A30 m cell size was selected to store the elevation data, soils and land cover digitized from existing maps. GRASS provides powerful tools for the derivation of the topographic parameters. Specifically, GRASS provides a watershed basin analysis tool which is used for watershed and stream delineation. Thus, given the elevation layer (Fig. 3a), this tool is used to generate the subcatchment areas, the stream segments, the drainage direction within each cell and the accumulation map provides the upland area draining to each cell. Further, GRASS provides other tools for terrain analysis, and an inference engine that allows users to build their set of rules to create new maps. Also, GRASS allows users to perform a wide range of arithmetic calculations on existing map layers and to create new layers. These mathematical calculations are done on a cell by cell basis following the mathematical functions supplied by the user. One of the fundamental parameters required by TOPMODEL is the topographic index. which is obtained primarily from the spatial distribution of slopes and the drainage accumulation map layer. This can be easily obtained by using GRASS capabilities of map computations. This procedure computes the topographic index based on the single flow direction. This approach allows flow to drain into a given cell only in the direction of the gradient vector. Quinn et al, (1991) presented another approach which allows the accumulated upslope148 S. Chairat & J.W. Delleur Hic ESS wow a) ) o) eeemeEBoeo Somriansunso Fig. 3 GRASS map layers of (a) elevation, (b) hydraulic conductivity, and (c) topographic index. flow from each cell to be distributed among eight flow directions by weighted proportions based on the slope angles and their directions. A GRASS tool is developed to determine the spatial distribution of the topographic index based on this multiple flow approach. Figure 3c shows the topographic index map layer obtained by applying this tool. Further details about this algorithm are given by Quinn et al, (1991). The hydraulic conductivity for the digitized soil types (Fig. 3b) are extracted from the SCS Soil-S interpretation data files. ‘This database contains soil properties for the soil series in the United States.Integrating a physically based hydrological model with GRASS 149 Intermediate process ‘Tools for both analyzing and visualizing need to be developed to allow the flow of information from GRASS to TOPMODEL and for graphical display of the model results. The continuous arrows shown in Fig. 2 indicate that the link has been established, while the dashed arrows mean that work is in progress to develop those links. Thus, a tool has been developed to extract information from GRASS map layers into a file format readable by TOPMODEL. These files contain information about the topographic index distribution, the subeatchment area, the stream length and the soil properties. The linkage of TOPMODEL's results to GRASS is still in progress. This tool will provide the display of the contributing areas for different time steps during the simulstion. This provides a better understanding of the dynamic expansion and contraction of zones of surface saturation in the catchment, and identifies the potential contributing areas. ‘Model analysis ‘The last step of this integration procedure consists of simulating precipitation events with a time step of 15 minutes. The rainfall, evaporation and sctual discharges information as well as the information provided by the intermediate step are input to the model simulation. The model generates the outflow hydrograph at the outlet, the baseflow separation, the subsurface flow ‘component, the rainfall excess distribution and the model efficiency. A second output is directed to the intermediate process, which provides information to be displayed by GRASS about the saturated zones in the catchment for several time steps of the simulation. Once the implementation of TOPMODEL on GRASS is completed, modification of the current routing procedure are considered. The utilities of. GIS make the extraction of the detailed geomorphological characteristics easier to obtain, Thus, this information will be used to generate the geomorphological instantaneous unit hydrograph. Further, the model will be extended to simulate spatially variable rainfall intensities. CONCLUSION ‘The Geographic Information System capabilities of putting together the large amount of spatial data required have been very efficient. Further, GIS has been very helpful for extracting the various basin characteristics such as the subcatchment areas, the stream network, slopes and the drainage direction. Although, certain parameters , ic. the topographic index, had to be computed through new functions that are built into the software, this task was successful using the subroutines provided by GRASS. ‘The link between TOPMODEL and GRASS is an efficient way for data150 S. Chairat & J.W. Delleur ‘manipulation and updates and is a powerful tool to investigate the effects of soil heterogeneity on the catchment response. This link provides future capabilities of incorporating the effect of the catchment geomo:phology and of implementing the model for larger watersheds. Further, the GIS_ utilities of surface fitting will be used to incorporate spatially variable rainfall intensities. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Dr. K. J. Bevea, University of Lancaster, UK, for his technical reports about TOPMODEL, Mr. Kurt Buehler, US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. for providing several GRASS documentations, Dr. B. Engel and his graduate students of the School of Agricultural Engineering at Purdue University for providing the digital elevation model, and Dr. J.R. Wright, Director of Water Resources Research Center, for his helpful comments. REFERENCES even, KJ. & Kirkby, MJ. (1979) A Physically Based, Variable Contributing Area Model of Basin Hydrology. Hydrol ci. 24(), 3:69. ‘even, KJ. & Wood, EF. (1983) Catchment Geomorphology and the Dynamies of Runoff Contributing ‘Areas. J. Hydro. 61/3), 139-158. ‘even, KJ, Kirby, MJ, Schofield N. & Tagg, A.F. (1984) Testing Physclly-Based Flood Forecasting ‘Model (TOPMODEL,) for Tce U.K. Catchments. J. Hydrol. 61/4), 119-14 ‘even, K) (1986) Hillsloe Runoff Processes and Food Frequency Characteristics. In: Hillslope Processes (Gd-by A.D. Abrahamms), 187-202, Allen and Unwin, Winchester, Mas. Beven, Ki (1989) Towards the Use of Catchment Geomorphology in Flood Frequency Predictions. Earth Sar. Processes and Landforms 12(\, 6982. Quinn, PF. 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