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This study focused on flood damage assessment for future floods under the impact of climate change. Four river basins of Southeast Asia were selected for the study. They included the Pampanga River Basin (PRB) in the Philippines, the Solo River Basin (SRB) in Indonesia, the Lower Mekong River Basin (LMRB) in Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Chao Phraya River Basin (CPRB) in Thailand. Flood damage to rice crops was assessed by flood damage functions considering flood depth and duration and the growth stage of rice plants. Flood characteristics such as flood depth, duration, and distribution were computed using the rainfall–runoff–inundation model to assess flood hazards under the present and future climatic conditions produced by MRI-AGCM3.2S. The damage assessment methodology for rice crops employed in this study was verified using data on past flood events. Then, flood damage assessment was conducted for both the present climate (1979–2003) and future climate (2075–2099) conditions, using MRI-AGCM3.2S precipitation datasets. Flood damage was assessed for worst cases chosen from each climate period and for floods of 50- and 100-year return periods with different rainfall patterns chosen from each climate scenario. The results of flood hazard and damage assessment show that the flood inundation area for a 100-year flood may increase in the future by 20% in PRB; by 66% in SRB; by 27% in LMRB; and by 27% in CPRB. The flood damage area of paddy fields for a 100-year flood may also increase in the future by 16% in PRB; by 55% in SRB; by 23% in LMRB; and by 13% in CPRB.

Nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in Chinese river catchments are contributed by agricultural non-point and industrial point sources causing deterioration of river water quality and degradation of ecosystem functioning for a long distance downstream. To evaluate these impacts, a distributed pollutant transport module was developed on the basis of BTOPMC (Block-Wise Use of TOPMODEL with Muskingum-Cunge Method), a grid-based distributed hydrological model, using the water flow routing process of BTOPMC as the carrier of pollutant transport due a direct runoff. The pollutant flux at each grid is simulated based on mass balance of pollutants within the grid and surface water transport of these pollutants occurs between grids in the direction of the water flow on daily time steps. The model was tested in the study area of the Lu county area situated in the Laixi River basin in the Sichuan province of southwest China. The simulated concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus are compared with the available monthly data at several water quality stations. These results demonstrate a greater pollutant concentration in the beginning of high flow period indicating the main mechanism of pollution transport. From these preliminary results, we suggest that the distributed pollutant transport model can reflect the characteristics of the pollutant transport and reach the expected target.

Climatic variations caused by the excessive emission of greenhouse gases are likely to change the patterns of precipitation, runoff processes, and water storage of river basins. Various studies have been conducted based on precipitation outputs of the global scale climatic models under different emission scenarios. However, there is a limitation in regional- and local-scale hydrological analysis on extreme floods with the combined application of high-resolution atmospheric general circulation models’ (AGCM) outputs and physically-based hydrological models (PBHM). This study has taken an effort to overcome that limitation in hydrological analysis. The present and future precipitation, river runoff, and inundation distributions for the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) were analyzed to understand hydrological changes in the LMB under the RCP8.5 scenario. The downstream area beyond the Kratie gauging station, located in the Cambodia and Vietnam flood plains was considered as the LMB in this study. The bias-corrected precipitation outputs of the Japan Meteorological Research Institute atmospheric general circulation model (MRI-AGCM3.2S) with 20 km horizontal resolution were utilized as the precipitation inputs for basin-scale hydrological simulations. The present climate (1979–2003) was represented by the AMIP-type simulations while the future (2075–2099) climatic conditions were obtained based on the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas scenario. The entire hydrological system of the Mekong basin was modelled by the block-wise TOPMODEL (BTOP) hydrological model with 20 km resolution, while the LMB area was modelled by the rainfall-runoff-inundation (RRI) model with 2 km resolution, specifically to analyze floods under the aforementioned climatic conditions. The comparison of present and future river runoffs, inundation distributions and inundation volume changes were the outcomes of the study, which can be supportive information for the LMB flood management, water policy, and water resources development.

This study modified the BTOPMC (Block-wise TOPMODEL with the Muskingum-Cunge routing method) distributed hydrological model to make it applicable to semi-arid regions by introducing an adjustment coefficient for infiltration capacity of the soil surface, and then applied it to two catchments above the dams in the Karun River basin, located in semi-arid mountain ranges in Iran. The application results indicated that the introduced modification improved the model performance for simulating flood peaks generated by infiltration excess overland runoff at a daily time scale. The modified BTOPMC was found to fulfil the need to reproduce important signatures of basin hydrology for water resource development, such as annual runoff, seasonal runoff, low flows and flood flows. However, it was also very clear that effective model use was significantly constrained by the scarcity of ground-gauged precipitation data. Considerable efforts to improve the precipitation data acquisition should precede water resour...

Topography is a dominant factor in hillslope hydrology. TOPMODEL, which uses a topographical index derived from a simplified steady state assumption of mass balance and empirical equations of motion over a hillslope, has many advantages in this respect. Its use has been demonstrated in many small basins (catchment areas of the order of 2–500 km2) but not in large basins (catchment areas of the order of 10 000–100 000 km2). The objective of this paper is to introduce the Block-wise TOPMODEL (BTOP) as an extension of the TOPMODEL concept in a grid based framework for distributed hydrological simulation of large river basins. This extension was made by redefining the topographical index by using an effective contributing area af(a) (0⩽f(a)⩽1) per unit grid cell area instead of the upstream catchment area per unit contour length and introducing a concept of mean groundwater travel distance. Further the transmissivity parameter T0 was replaced by a groundwater dischargeability D which can provide a link between hill slope hydrology and macro hydrology. The BTOP model uses all the original TOPMODEL equations in their basic form. The BTOP model has been used as the core hydrological module of an integrated distributed hydrological model YHyM with advanced modules of precipitation, evapotranspiration, flow routing etc. Although the model has been successfully applied to many catchments around the world since 1999, there has not been a comprehensive theoretical basis presented in such applications. In this paper, an attempt is made to address this issue highlighted with an example application using the Mekong basin. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study investigates the Mekong River basin hydrology for the 1980–2000 period using a grid-based distributed hydrological model called Yamanashi Hydrological Model (YHyM). The performance of the model is evaluated using data observed at different locations and the results justify the physical soundness of the model. The seasonal variations of climatic and hydrological characteristics of the basin such as soil moisture, ground water saturation deficit, runoff, precipitation, evapotranspiration, etc. are analysed. On the basis of the simulated results, it is noticeable that there is no significant trend in the precipitation, discharge, or soil moisture state of the basin during the simulated period, though there are some seasonal variations which seem to be natural. However the analysis on the precipitation elasticity (E) of the river flow shows that the E values for all sub-basins are greater than unity, which indicates that x% change in annual precipitation can cause > x% change in annual river flow. Further the basin hydrological responses are analysed for a long term synthetically-induced drought the results of which show the significance of the base flow of the Mekong River basin. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A geo-referenced global dam reservoir database is constructed by assembling several published dam inventories and latitude/longitude coordinates that are digital obtained or decided from printed maps. This database is designed for hydrological applications on river basin scale to the global scale, and 15, 317 dams with 29 dam reservoir attributes are registered in it. A shoreline polygon data of the reservoir/lake is also provided for 4, 204 dams. The total storage capacity of the registered dams is 5, 594km3, which is equivalent to the 70% of total storage capacity of all reservoirs and lakes over the world (7, 000 km3). Since geo-referenced reservoir database which covers whole global area is rarely available, the database will greatly contribute for global scale water resources analysis and impact assessment of reservoirs on the freshwater systems.

A basin-scale pollutant load and its transportation processes are discussed in this study. The unit loading method combined with census and GIS data is used to estimate spatial distribution of pollutant load within the basin. the method allows grid-base representation of pollutant load, and makes it possible to link the pollutant production with distributed hydrological model. The spatial distribution of pollutant load and channel purification process model are then integrated into the distributed hydrological model to simulate dynamic behavior of water quality and quantity along the stream. These methods have potential to be used for understanding the water quality over the large area with less data requirement, and could be applied for integrated river basin management.

The purpose of this study is to understand the potential impact of reservoir induced water storage on the basin scale water cycle. In this study, the increase of the basin scale residence time of river water is used as the index of the effect of reservoir on water cycle, and its spatial and temporal distribution in Japan are demonstrated. The results of analysis show that the potential increase of residence time by dam reservoirs in Japan has gradually increased from 1960's and reached to 14.5 days in 1995. The actual residence time increase is also estimated in the Tone river basin where operation and seasonal variation of river discharge are taken into account. It is shown that the estimated actual residence time is much smaller than the potential, in the case of the Tone river basin, 45%.

Climate and land use change impacts on river flow were evaluated in this study with emphasis placed on turbidity. Turbidity levels for the year 2020 were projected for Gin River, one of the prime sources of drinking water in Southern Sri Lanka. Future land use in the Gin catchment was predicted using a GIS based statistical regression approach. Regional Climate Modelling system generated the future rainfall for the SRES A2 and SRES A1B emission scenarios. Streamflow simulations were carried out using a distributed hydrologic model, and turbidity values were determined using rating curve based relationship developed between river discharge and TSS (Total Suspended Solid) concentration followed by Turbidity-TSS linear regression correlation. Increased turbidity levels are clearly evident under the SRES A2 scenario, following more pronounced increased stream flows. Projected 75th percentile monthly turbidity values in year 2020 are expected to increase during May to November compared to the baseline, and in certain months, about 100%increase is noted. 60% of the time, year 2020 turbidity levels have indicated exceedance of the water quality standards set for the potable water as well the inland waters of Sri Lanka, which would lead to exert extra challenge on future drinking water production in Southern region of Sri Lanka. ENGINEER, Vol. 48, No.01, pp. 61-70, 2015