Calibration of HEC-RAS Model on Prediction of Flood for Lower Tapi River, India

Abstract

Channel roughness is a sensitive parameter in development of hydraulic model for flood forecasting and flood inundation mapping. The requirement of multiple channel roughness coefficient Mannnig’s ‘n’ values along the river has been spelled out through simulation of floods, using HEC-RAS, for years 1998 and 2003, supported with the photographs of river reaches collected during the field visit of the lower Tapi River. The calibrated model, in terms of channel roughness, has been used to simulate the flood for year 2006 in the river. The performance of the calibrated HEC-RAS based model has been accessed by capturing the flood peaks of observed and simulated floods; and computation of root mean squared error (RMSE) for the intermediated gauging stations on the lower Tapi River.