Effect of urban development on runoff generation by SWMM, case study: Khuzestan Province, Izeh

Water harvesting and surface runoff control systems are the important components of urban planning and development and ignoring these issues is likely to raise crisis. In order to decrease the urban flood damages, the urban runoff is needed to be evaluated correctly. Today some of models are developed for urban runoff simulation. One of the most important models in evaluating and management of urban runoff is SWMM. The aim of this study is to evaluate SWMM efficiency on urban runoff simulation in Izeh urban basin. To define design rain, concentration time was computed while considering the duration of the cloudburst as equal to this time. Also three performance indexes of Nash-Sutklif, errors sum of squares and Bias were used in order to model calibration and validation. Moreover, areas of high susceptibility were determined for two, five, 10, 20 and 50 years of return periods. Later, it was found that the principle reason of inundation is the lack of sufficient capacity of water ways. In some points, even with sufficient capacity, inundation occurs, confirmed by model. In these cases the causes stem from the improper design and construction of bridges which has lessen the size of water ways and caused junk clogging. Three rainfall events were recorded on March 13, 2017, March 28, 2017 and April 6, 2017 which were considered in order to calibrate and evaluate the model performance. Along with that, the discharge, depth and velocity of water at the outlet were considered as well. The results of the SWMM application gave indication of a good matchup between discharge, depth and the velocity of runoff for observed and estimated data. In this case, this model could be utilized to well predict the inundation hazard, design and the estimation of the cost and volume of drainage systems, management of watershed and prioritization of region to address flooding issues.