by Sumana Sarkar & S. Himesh 

The monsoon-driven river basins are more vulnerable to the flash-floods triggered by intense rainfall activities. Due to the lack of adequate high resolution forecast of real-time hydro-meteorological variables, a reliable forecast of flash floods remains a challenge. One plausible way to generate such a high-resolution forecast of hydro-meteorological variables is to use a coupled atmospheric–hydrologic modelling system. Thus, in this study, a physically-based, fully distributed, multi-scale hydrologic modelling framework, WRF-Hydro with optimized configurations (stand-alone and coupled-mode) is used to simulate the important hydro-meteorological variables like precipitation, runoff, soil moisture, and land surface heat fluxes over Cauvery river basin, India. In stand-alone mode, the model is driven by the high-resolution gridded data from the Global Land Data Assimilation System; while the coupled model is run with the WRF atmospheric model. In this study, the ability of a fully coupled WRF–WRF-Hydro modelling framework , with 3 km grid spacing is used to simulate the hydro-meteorological conditions during an extreme rainfall event (08–09 August 2019). The innermost domain of WRF-Hydro in conjunction with a high resolution hydrological routing grid (300 m) is also utilized, to include the subgrid scale disaggregation–aggregation weighting procedures to generate the land–atmospheric feedbacks on the hydrometeorological variables. The resulting variables have been validated through relevant observations; the overall performance of the coupled WRF-Hydro is shown to be relatively good when compared to the WRF-only simulations.

Source: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00024-021-02684-4