Impact of Spatial Distribution Methods for Rainfall on Flash Floods Modelling Using a Hydrodynamic Model

ABSTRACT In small mountain catchments, the spatial and temporal resolution of rainfall can vary significantly across the catchment. However, rainfall gauging stations can be sparse in these regions, and collected data may not reflect the real rainfall distribution across the catchment. When modelling flash floods, finding a suitable approach to estimate the actual rainfall distribution is nontrivial. In this study, the effectiveness of different methods for obtaining a spatial and temporal rainfall distribution for use in numerical modelling of flash floods was investigated using a full two‐dimensional depth‐averaged shallow‐water hydrodynamic model. It was demonstrated that the Thiessen polygon method and the inverse distance weighted interpolation method (IDW), with appropriate empirical coefficients, produce results in agreement with observed stage and discharge hydrographs. We show that the uniform distribution method cannot be used to represent realistic spatial and temporal variability of rainfall for flash flood events in small mountain catchments. By combining available data with the common IDW method, missing rainfall timeseries data in a small catchment can be estimated, even for short‐duration time scales, such as a single flash flood event.