Development of Hydrologic Simulation Model for the Prediction of Long-Term Runoff from a Small Watershed

Abstract Over 700/0 of the rural land area in Korea is mountainous and small watersheds provide most of the water resources for agricutural use. To provide an appropriate tool for the agricultural water resource development project, SNUA2, a mathematical model for simulating the physical processes governing the precipitation-runoff relationships and predicting the storm and long-term runoff quantities from the small mountainous watersheds was developed. The hydrological characteristics of small mountainous watersheds were reviewed to select appropriate theories for the simulation of the runoff processes, and a deterministic and distributed model was developed. In this, subsurface flows are routed by solving Richard's two dimensional equation, the dynamics of soil moisture contents are simulated by the consideration of phenological factors of canopy plants and surface flows are routed by solving the kinematic wave theory by numerical analysis. As a result of an application test of the model to the Sanglim watershed, peak flow rates of storm runoff were over-estimated by up to 184.2%. The occurence time of peak flow and total runoff volume of storm runoffs simulated were consistent with observed values and the annual runoff volumes were simulated in the error range of less than 5.8%.