Simulation of discharges using TOPKAPI model and remote sensing data to Tropical Catchments in the Dominican Republic

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Ronald Vega Romero

Thursday 2 july 2015

12:00 - 12:15h at Central America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Water resources and hydro informatics (WRHI), (ST) Catchment hydrology

Parallel session: 11H. Water resources - Catchment

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Dominican Republic is located in the Caribbean, an area prone to heavy rains and tropical storms. The presence of these meteorological events affects measurements of rainfall and discharges because often they exceed the capacity of measuring stations and generates uncertainty or wrong data. In this paper we apply the physically-based and spatially full distributed TOPKAPI model, in a first attempt to build a more reliable method to measure discharges during extreme events. To this goal, we analyze middle size catchments in the North Yaque river basin located in western Dominican Republic. Like gauge stations could be affected by storms, we decided to use remote sensing with TRMM data on daily scale; this data was not corrected because we are looking for the most simple method and we are assuming that all corrections will absorbed by the model calibration process. Discharges correspond to hydrometric gauges; temperature was taken from NCEP-DOE reanalysis and topography from aster satellite image. Another complementary information like landuse, soil type, and cover were taken from previous assessments. Then, we developed a typical calibration and validation varying the soil and reservoir parameters. Results showed a good correlation between simulated and registered discharges which suggest a good performance and the possibility to analyze hyetograph and histograms during extreme events. This application will be useful as example to analyze other catchments in large of this country.