Author(s)

Mohamed Msaddek¹, George Kimbowa^2,3,4*, Abdelkader El Garouani¹

¹Faculty of Sciences and Techniques, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Route Imouzzer, Fez, Morocco.
²Pan African University, Institute of Water and Energy Sciences (Including Climate Change), (PAUWES), C/o University AbouBekrBelkaid, Tlemcen, Algeria.
³Faculty of Engineering, Busitema University, Tororo, Uganda.
⁴Wageningen University and Research, Water Resources Management Group, Wageningen, Netherlands.

Human population growth and land-use changes raise demand and competition for water resources. The Upper OumErRabia River Basin is experiencing high rangeland and matorral conversion to irrigated agricultural land expansion. Given Morocco’s per capita water availability, River-basin hydrologic modelling could potentially bring together agricultural, water resources and conservation objectives. However, not everywhere have hydrological models considered events and continuous assessment of climatic data. In this study, HEC-HMS modelling approach is used to explore the event-based and continuous-process simulation of land-use and land cover change (LULCC) impact on water balance. The use of HEC-GeoHMS facilitated the digital data processing for coupling with the model. The basin’s physical characteristics and the hydro-climatic data helped to generate a geospatial database for HEC-HMS model. We analyzed baseline and future scenario changes for the 1980-2016 period using the SCS Curve-Number and the Soil Moisture Accounting (SMA) loss methods. SMA was coupled with the Hargreaves evapotranspiration method. Model calibration focused on reproducing observed basin runoff hydrograph. To evaluate the model performance for both calibration and validation, the Coefficient of determination (R²), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), Root Mean Square Error (RSR) and Percent Bias (PBIAS) criteria were exploited. The average calibration NSE values were 0.740 and 0.585 for event-based (daily) and continuous-process (annual) respectively. The R², RSR and PBIAS values were 0.624, 0.634 and +16.7 respectively. This is rated as good performance besides the validation simulations were satisfactory for subsequent hydrologic analyses. We conclude that the basin’s hydrologic response to positive and negative LULCC scenarios is significant both positive and negative scenarios. The study findings provide useful information for key stakeholders/decision-makers in water resources.

HEC-HMS Model, Land-Use and Land Cover Change, Soil Moisture Accounting (SMA), Upper OumErRabia Watershed

Msaddek, M. , Kimbowa, G. and Garouani, A. (2020) Hydrological Modeling of Upper OumErRabia Basin (Morocco), Comparative Study of the Event-Based and Continuous-Process HEC-HMS Model Methods. Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering, 9, 159-184. doi: 10.4236/cweee.2020.94011.