Modeling Daily Floods in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin Using an Improved Hydrological-Hydrodynamic Model

Daily floods including event, characteristic, extreme and inundation in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin (LMRB), crucial for flood projection and forecasting, have not been adequately modeled. An improved hydrological-hydrodynamic model (VIC and CaMa-Flood) considering regional parameterization was developed to simulate the flood dynamics over the basin from 1967 to 2015. The flood elements were extracted from daily time series and evaluated at both local and regional scales using the data collected from in-situ observations and remote sensing. The results show that the daily discharge and water level are both well simulated at selected stations with relative error (RE) less than 10% and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE) over 0.90. Half of the flood events have NSE exceeding 0.76. The peak time and flood volume are well reproduced while both peak discharge and water level are slightly underestimated. The results tend to worsen when the characteristics of flood events are extended to annual extremes. These extremes are generally underestimated with NSE less than 0.5 but RE is within 20%. The simulated rainy season inundation area generally agrees with observations from remote sensing, with about 86.8% inundation occurrence frequency captured within the model capacity. Ignoring the regional parameterization and reservoir regulation can both deteriorate flood simulation performance at the local scale, resulting in lower NSE. Specifically, systematically higher water levels and up to 27% overestimation of peak discharge are found when ignoring regional parameterization, while ignoring reservoir regulation would cause up to 23% overestimation for flood extremes. It is expected that these findings would contribute to the regional flood forecasting and flood management.