How uncertain are precipitation and peak flow estimates for the July 2021 flooding event?

Saadi, Mohamed; Furusho-Percot, Carina; Belleflamme, Alexandre; Chen, Ju-Yu; Trömel, Silke; Kollet, Stefan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-159-2023

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-159-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-159-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 1

Research article

|

17 Jan 2023

Research article |

| 17 Jan 2023

How uncertain are precipitation and peak flow estimates for the July 2021 flooding event?

Mohamed Saadi, Carina Furusho-Percot, Alexandre Belleflamme, Ju-Yu Chen, Silke Trömel, and Stefan Kollet

Model code and software

parflow-350/parflow: ParFlow Version 3.5.0 Steven Smith, reedmaxwell, i-ferguson, FabianGasper, Nick Engdahl, Laura Condon, xy124, Ketan Kulkarni, Joe Beisman, basileh, geouke, cswoodward, Jose A. Fonseca, and David Thompson https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3555297

The suite of lumped GR hydrological models in an R package (https:// hydrogr.github.io/airGR/) L. Coron, G. Thirel, O. Delaigue, C. Perrin, and V. Andréassian https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.05.002

Short summary

On 14 July 2021, heavy rainfall fell over central Europe, causing considerable damage and human fatalities. We analyzed how accurate our estimates of rainfall and peak flow were for these flooding events in western Germany. We found that the rainfall estimates from radar measurements were improved by including polarimetric variables and their vertical gradients. Peak flow estimates were highly uncertain due to uncertainties in hydrological model parameters and rainfall measurements.