Hydrological modelling for river basin management in a highly hydro-geological conditioned environment

Abstract

Water resources management represents a present key issue in hydrology, and hydrological models generating streamflow time series are useful tools in this field. It is possible to refer, in the extreme, to lumped or fully distributed approaches, but when river basins with particular features have to be modeled it is possible to take advantage of a semi-distributed formulation. In this study we propose a semi-distributed conceptually based modeling approach, supported by field measurements collected within several seasonal campaigns, that has been set up for the Bussento river basin, located in southern Italy, characterized by soils and rocks with highly different hydraulic permeability and above all a highly hydro-geological conditioning. The proposed approach, which joins together all hydraulic, hydrological and geological data, is able to reproduce the river discharge mean characteristic.