154 - Application of Pre-processed Radar-Based Gridded Precipitation using Streamlined Workflow of HECHMS and HECRAS

Significant development in remotely sensed gridded precipitation data archives has been observed recently. Contemporarily, the advancement in the field of 2D rain-on-mesh modeling technique for creating a spatially detailed rainfall-runoff model have extended the use of gridded precipitation products. Unlike point precipitation data, radar and satellite-based precipitation products can be effective in modeling the spatial variations in the rainfall within a watershed during event-based modeling. This promotes the use of gridded precipitation data for calibrating and validating the models for a historic event. Agencies like National Weather Service (NWS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and United States Geological Survey (USGS) provide gridded precipitation products based on different remote sensing and quality control algorithms. Moreover, the estimation and quality control of these gridded precipitation data sets is not consistent among different sources and their spatiotemporal resolution varies widely. The current study aims to compare and evaluate the efficiency of different types of gridded rainfall data for the rainfall-runoff simulation of a historic event. – HECRAS, developed by USACE, can route the gridded precipitation products by evaluating the losses for each computational cell within the mesh and routing the excess precipitation downstream. The current study utilized gridded precipitation data such as NEXRAD Stage III, NCEP Stage IV, AORC, and NARR as the input to a HECRAS rain on mesh model to identify the products that can closely predict the historic runoff at the gauged streamflow stations. Multiple storm events were considered for unbiased hypothesis testing while the obtained results may vary with the watersheds and the modeling approach.