Development and Integration of Sub-Daily Flood Modelling Capability within the SWAT Model and a Comparison with XAJ Model

To date, floods have become one of the most severe natural disasters on Earth. Flood forecasting with hydrological models is an important non-engineering measure for flood control and disaster reduction. The Xin’anjiang (XAJ) model is the most widely used hydrological model in China for flood forecasting, while the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is widely applied for daily and monthly simulation and has shown its potential for flood simulation. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the SWAT model in simulating floods at a sub-daily time-scale in a slightly larger basin and compare that with the XAJ model. Taking Qilijie Basin (southeast of China) as a study area, this paper developed the XAJ model and SWAT model at a sub-daily time-scale. The results showed that the XAJ model had a better performance than the sub-daily SWAT model regarding relative runoff error (RRE) but the SWAT model performed well according to relative peak discharge error (RPE) and error of occurrence time of peak flow (PTE). The SWAT model performed unsatisfactorily in simulating low flows due to the daily calculation of base flow but behaved quite well in simulating high flows. We also evaluated the effect of spatial scale on the SWAT model. The results showed that the SWAT model had a good applicability at different spatial scales. In conclusion, the sub-daily SWAT model is a promising tool for flood simulation though more improvements remain to be studied further.