I'm trying to evaluate how morphological modifications affect overland flow (surface runoff), I should work at field scale. I'm searching a hydrological/hydraulic model to simulate it.
Go through this
https://water.usgs.gov/cgi-bin/man_wrdapp?genscn
Data Continuous Rainfall-Runoff Model - MISDc (Matlab code)
http://abouthydrology.blogspot.com/2012/08/r-resources-for-hydrologists.html
You might look into WEPP (Water Erosion Prediction Project) if you have enough rainfall and site data to satisfy the model demands. In many to most instances, soil type, cover, vegetation type and density of plants or trees, slope, etc. will have influence on both runoff and erosion. I think the WEPP model has both an erosion and a runoff estimate, but have not used in many years. Some soils develop hydrophobic conditions temporarily after severe wildfires, that can significantly increase runoff response. Forests have a tendency to have very low to no direct surface runoff. You might be interested in my paper on Hazel Pistol Erosion Plot study in my researchgate list. I would search your area of interest for available stream gauging and catchment study data, and evaluate land use, soils, topography relative to available data. With some effort, you can try to separate the runoff from interflow and base flow (such as chemistry separation with end member analysis or perhaps specific conductivity measures in runoff hydrograph).
Overland flow low is difficult to see or measure, and may only occur briefly and episodically. Activities that compact soil or cover with impervious surfaces will increase runoff. In some instances, activities can decrease runoff for a time, such as cultivation, but if fine soil particles fill macro pores from rainfall impact on exposed soil surfaces, surface runoff can increase to levels beyond initial undesturbed surfaces. You might consider using surface erosion as a surrogate for runoff by using the RUSLE equation. Evaluating the RUSLE factors probably cover the main elements needed in estimating runoff.
The US SCS (now NRCS) developed a basic model many years ago that is sometimes used based on soil type response - CN values, land use, etc. If you use it, I would validate it first to your conditions using available watershed flow data.
Instrumenting small ephemeral to intermittent catchments is another approach. Recording raingauges and vented transducers with constructed flume make this reasonably possible.
HEC-RAS now has rain on grid for modeling runoff. It does not abstract any water for soil saturation/ponding time, so you have to make that adjustment yourself if you're modeling a particular rain event, but if you're just looking at how morphology changes affect runoff direction/concentration, it should work well. The trick is putting in the different surfaces using an open source program, would definitely work better if you had access to AutoCAD. But simple changes can be accomplished in HEC-RAS using 1-D with cross-sections.
We use the DHSVM for field scale: although it is mostly concerned with subsurface flow, it has a decent 2D solver for surface runoff, and also allows 1D modeling of channel networks. It is open source (https://dhsvm.pnnl.gov/) but it is a research package, meaning that it does not have a friendly GUI. Also, if you want to perform efficient surface runoff simulations with it, check out the enhancements we implemented in our paper: Zhang, L., Nan, Z., Liang, X., Xu, Y., Hernández, F., and Li, L. (2018). “Application of the MacCormack scheme to overland flow routing for high-spatial resolution distributed hydrological model.” Journal of Hydrology, 558, 421–431.
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