The spatially distributed hydrologic model WetSpa that works on daily, hourly, and minutely timescales is used to predict the flood hydrographs and spatial distribution of the hydrologic characteristics in a river basin by combining elevation, soil and land-use data within Geographical Information System. This model was applied in Ziarat river basin (95.15 km 2 ) located in Golestan Province of Iran. Hourly hydro-meteorological data from 2008 to 2010 consist of precipitation data of two stations, temperature data of one station and evaporation data measured at one station, which were used as input data of the model. Three base maps namely DEM, land-use and soil types were produced in GIS form using 30 × 30 m cell size. Results of the simulations revealed a good agreement between calculated and measured hydrographs at the outlet of the river basin. The model predicted the hourly hydrographs with a good accuracy between 62% - 74% according to the Nash-Sutcliff criteria. To evaluate the model performance during the calibration and validation periods an Aggregated Measure (AM) was introduced that measures different aspects of the simulated hydrograph such as shape, size, and volume. The statistics of Ziarat river basin showed that the results produced by the model were very good in the calibration and validation periods.
KeywordsFlood PredictionHydrological ModelingWetSpa ModelZiarat River Basin
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