Flood routing via a copula-based approach

Abstract

Floods are among the most common natural disasters that if not controlled may cause severe damage and high costs. Flood control and management can be done using structural measures that should be designed based on the flood design studies. The simulation of outflow hydrograph using inflow hydrograph can provide useful information. In this study, a copula-based approach was applied to simulate the outflow hydrograph of various floods, including the Wilson River flood, the River Wye flood and the Karun River flood. In this regard, twodimensional copula functions and their conditional density were used. The results of evaluating the dependence structure of the studied variables (inflow and outflow hydrographs) using Kendall’s tau confirmed the applicability of copula functions for bivariate modeling of inflow and outflow hydrographs. The simulation results were evaluated using the root-mean-square error, the sum of squared errors and the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE). The results showed that the copula-based approach has high performance. In general, the copula-based approach has been able to simulate the peak flow and the rising and falling limbs of the outflow hydrographs well. Also, all simulated data are at the 95% confidence interval. The NSE values for the copula-based approach are 0.99 for all three case studies. According to NSE values and violin plots, it can be seen that the performance of the copula-based approach in simulating the outflow hydrograph in all three case studies is acceptable and shows a good performance.