Flash Flood Prediction in Small to Medium-Sized Watersheds. Case Study: Bistra River (Apuseni Mountains, Romania)

Overview & Synopsis

Romania is among the European countries which are still susceptible to flood disasters. Climate change, the lack of a sustainable land management and floods approach are the most important driving factors of flood risk. Accordingly, additional research to improve or develop various methods for predicting the flash flood events, especially within densely populated watersheds, is required. This paper aims to provide a further assessment of the reliability of a distributed hydrological model developed within a GIS framework The model was developed for use in small river basins and so forth, another objective is to provide insight into whether it is acceptable for use in larger-sized watersheds than the ones it was created for. The methodology is presented by computing the discharges at the entrance of six human settlements located within the Bistra river watershed, a left-bank tributary of Barcău river (Bihor department, Romania). The chosen study area is frequently impacted by flooding, endangering the socioeconomic activities, human settlements and infrastructure. A distributed hydrological modeling approach and the SCS-CN method are used in this research. The results revealed a good correlation between the estimated and measured hydrographs at the gauging points of Pădurea Neagră (upstream) and Chiribiș (located at the downstream end of the drainage basin).