Calibration of Hydraulic Model for Buna River

Year 2016, Volume: 11 Issue: 2, 198 - 206, 30.06.2016

Elona Abazi

Abstract

River flooding is one of the most frequent
natural hazards in Albania. The area which is more vulnerable from river
flooding is the area located in the county of Shkodra, in the northern part.
This area has been significantly affected from flooding of Buna River in the
recent years. Buna River, with a total length of around 44 km, collects the
water from an important water system in Albania, composed of Shkodra Lake and
Drini River, for which a flood model has been set-up using the HEC-RAS
hydraulic software, based on the digital terrain model in WGS-84 coordinate
system developed from the topographic survey made from both countries Albania
and Montenegro. The hydraulic model built for Buna
River have been calibrated using the trial and error method,  reducing the difference between computed and observed
water levels, by manually changing hydraulic roughness coefficients, Manning’s “n” values
for the main channel and the overbank area. Model
performance during the calibration phase it is evaluated through both
qualitative and quantitative measures, including both graphical comparisons of
calculated and measured water levels and statistical tests. For the Buna River, the water levels modelled by HEC-RAS are in fairly
good agreement with the observed data
from online station. The
values of the model error chosen to evaluate the performance of the hydraulic
model after calibration process for low-flow and high- flow are quite
satisfactory.

Keywords

HEC-RAS, Buna River, mathematical model, model calibration

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