Advanced flood forecasting in Alpine watersheds by coupling meteorological observations and forecasts with a distributed hydrological model

Flood forecasting may be improved by coupling atmospheric and hydrological models. To investigate the current potential of such an approach in complex mountain watersheds, the authors carried out a number of combined high-resolution one-way driven model experiments to generate runoff hydrographs for seven extreme flood events which occurred in the Lago Maggiore basin between 1993 and 2000. The Alpine Ticino–Verzasca–Maggia basin (2627 km2) is located directly to the south of the main Alpine ridge embracing a great part of the drainage area of Lago Maggiore. For this basin, the grid-based hydrological catchment model WaSiM-ETH was employed to determine the continuous runoff hydrographs. In the model experiments, two different sets of meteorological input data were used: (1) surface observation data from station measurements and from weather radar, and (2) forecast data from five different high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models with grid cell sizes between 2 and 14 km. This paper presents and compares selected results of these flood runoff simulations with particular attention to the experimental design of the model coupling. The configuration and initialization of the hydrological model runs are outlined as well as the down-scale techniques which proved to provide an adequate spatial interpolation of the meteorological variables onto the 500 m×500 m grid of the hydrological model. In order to evaluate the various hydrological model results as generated from the different outputs from the five NWP models, some coupled experiments with ‘non-standard’ NWP model outputs have been carried out. In particular, the results of these sensitivity studies point to inherent limits of high-resolution flood runoff predictions in complex mountain terrain.