Flood Hazard Zonation by Combining Mod-Clark and HEC-RAS Models in Bustan Dam Basin, Golestan Province

Flood is one of the devastating phenomena which every year incurs casualties and property damages. Flood zonation is an efficient technique for flood management. The main goal of this research is flood hazard and risk zonation along a 21 km reach of the Gorganrud river in Bustan dam watershed considering two conditions: present landuse condition and scenario planning. To this end a combination of a hydrologic model (the distributed HEC-HMS with the Mod-Clark transform option) and a hydraulic model (HEC-RAS) were used. The required inputs to run the Mod-Clarck module of HEC-HMS are gridded files of river basin, curve number and rainfall with the SHG coordinate system and DSS format. In this research the input files were prepared using the Watershed Modeling System (WMS) at cell size of 200 m. Since the Mod-Clark method requires rainfall data as radar format (NEXRAD), the distributed rainfall mapseries with time intervals of 15 minutes prepared within the PCRaster GIS system were converted to the DSS format using the asc2dss package. also the curve number map was converted to the DSS format using HEC-GeoHMS. Then, these DSS files were substituted with rainfall and curve number maps within the WMS. After calibration and validation, model was run for return periods of 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100 and 200 years, in two conditions of current landuse and scenario planning. The simulated peak discharge data, geometric parameters of river and cross section (at 316 locations) data prepared by the HEC-GeoRAS software and roughness coefficients data, were used by the HEC-RAS software to simulate the hydraulic behavior of the river and flood inundation area maps were produced using GIS. The results of the evaluation showed that in addition to the percent error in peak flow, less than 3.2%, the model has a good performance in peak flow simulation, but is not successful in volume estimation. The results of flood zones revealed that from the total area in floodplain with return period of 200 years, 96.94% of the area is exposed to the return period of 25 years floods, and a main part of damages go to the floodplains which are under a return period of 25 years floods.