Rainfall threshold determination for flash flood warning in mountainous catchments with consideration of antecedent soil moisture and rainfall pattern

Abstract

Flash flood disaster is a prominent issue threatening public safety and social development throughout the world, especially in mountainous regions. Rainfall threshold is a widely accepted alternative to hydrological forecasting for flash flood warning due to the short response time and limited observations of flash flood events. However, determination of rainfall threshold is still very complicated due to multiple impact factors, particular for antecedent soil moisture and rainfall patterns. In this study, hydrological simulation approach (i.e., China Flash Flood-Hydrological Modeling System: CNFF-HMS) was adopted to capture the flash flood processes. Multiple scenarios were further designed with consideration of antecedent soil moisture and rainfall temporal patterns to determine the possible assemble of rainfall thresholds by driving the CNFF-HMS. Moreover, their effects on rainfall thresholds were investigated. Three mountainous catchments (Zhong, Balisi and Yu villages) in southern China were selected for case study. Results showed that the model performance of CNFF-HMS was very satisfactory for flash flood simulations in all these catchments, especially for multimodal flood events. Specifically, the relative errors of runoff and peak flow were within ± 20%, the error of time to peak flow was within ± 2 h and the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency was greater than 0.90 for over 90% of the flash flood events. The rainfall thresholds varied between 93 and 334 mm at Zhong village, between 77 and 246 mm at Balisi village and between 111 and 420 mm at Yu village. Both antecedent soil moistures and rainfall temporal pattern significantly affected the variations of rainfall threshold. Rainfall threshold decreased by 8–38 and 0–42% as soil saturation increased from 0.20 to 0.50 and from 0.20 to 0.80, respectively. The effect of rainfall threshold was the minimum for the decreasing hyetograph (advanced pattern) and the maximum for the increasing hyetograph (delayed pattern), while it was similar for the design hyetograph and triangular hyetograph (intermediate patterns). Moreover, rainfall thresholds with short time spans were more suitable for early flood warning, especially in small rural catchments with humid climatic characteristics. This study was expected to provide insights into flash flood disaster forecasting and early warning in mountainous regions, and scientific references for the implementation of flash flood disaster prevention in China.