Hydrological Simulation of Flood Events At Large Basins Using Distributed Modelling

Recent advances in technology allows to the scientist community advance in new pro- cedures in order to reduce the risk associated to flood events. A conceptual distributed model has been implemented to simulate the hydrological processes involved during floods. The model has been named TETIS. The basin is divided into rectangular cells, all of them connected according to the network drainage. The rainfall-runoff process is modelled using four linked tanks at each cell with different outflow relationships at each tank, which represent the ET, direct runoff, interflow and base flow, respectively. The routing along the channel network has been proposed using basin geomorpho- logic characteristics coupled to the cinematic wave procedure. The vertical movement along the cell is proposed using simple relationships based on soil properties as field capacity and the saturated hydraulic conductivities, which were previously obtained using land use, litology, edaphology and basin properties maps. The different vertical proccesses along the cell included are: capillar storage, infiltration, percolation and underground losses. Finally, snowmelting and reservoir routing has been included. TETIS has been implemented in the flood warning system of the Tagus River, with a basin of 59 200 km2. The time discretization of the input data is 15 minutes, and the cell size is 500x500 m. The basic parameter maps were estimated for the entire basin, and a calibration and validation processes were performed using some recorded events in the upper part of the basin. Calibration confirmed the initial parameter estimation. Additionally, the validation in time and space showed the robustness of these types of models