Development of a distributed hydrological model based on MapWinGIS

A distributed hydrological model that can simulate the hydrological processes of watershed by considering both saturation-excess and infiltration-excess runoff mechanisms is intruduced. The model is based on MapWinGIS platform and adopts modular programming ideas, watershed features such as river network and subbasins can be extracted automatically. In the model, the hydrological processes of watershed are divided into evapotranspiration, runoff gereration, overland flow, interflow, groundwater flow and river channel flow, and each process has a variety of calculation methods This model considers multiple runoff generation mechanisms, such as saturation-excess runoff and infiltration-excess runoff. The calibration and test of the model are performed in qinhuai river watershed, a basin in Jiangsu province, eastern China. The results show that the watershed features extracted automatically based on MapWindow GIS is reasonable, and the simulated runoff hydrograph is pretty matching the observed values.