Hydrological Model to Simulate Daily Flow in a Basin with the Help of a GIS

Abstract

Hydrological modeling is an essential tool to evaluate water resources in hydrological basins. The time invested in it depends on the structure of the hydrological model chosen, the amount and quality of information required and the efforts invested in calibration. CEQUEAU is a distributed hydrological model developed at the INRS-ETE, Quebec, Canada. The basin is divided into cells and the rainfall-runoff process is simulated cell by cell until the outlet. Recent advances in geomatics make it possible to develop modules integrated in geographic information systems (GIS) to facilitate the processing of information required by hydrological models. The objective of the present investigation is to implement the CEQUEAU model in Idrisi GIS for the hydrological modeling of basins, thereby reducing information processing time and improving limitations in the original version, such as the number of discretization cells and methods to calculate evapotranspiration. This document presents the results from the implementation of the CEQUEAU model, including evapotranspiration, water levels (in reservoirs, soil and aquifers) and hydrographs. These results show that these new changes provide more hydrology options to the user and with better results.