Development and Evaluation of a Saturated Zone Module in an Integrated Urban Hydrological Model

Abstract

Shallow urban groundwater interacts with surface water and underground infrastructures. Low-impact development in urban water management by at-source infiltration should consider shallow urban groundwater in a holistic manner. Traditional hydrological models, however, rarely detail groundwater flows and their interaction with urban runoff and the water budget. In the present study, a new approach is proposed, using the integration of a flow module WTI for the saturated zone in a distributed urban hydrological model URBS-MO. This integration is carried out by paying attention to retaining the initial waterflow subsurface parameterization. The performance of the integrated model is evaluated by piezometric and runoff data in an experimental urban catchment, through a sensitivity analysis and a manual calibration of the main model parameters, as well as a validation step. The new module shows its capacity to improve groundwater flow simulation by assessing more realistic water table variations, along with a very small improvement of flowrate simulation. The bias on the average groundwater level was reduced from +14 to +7% for the one-year validation period. The modelling results show the importance of parameter calibration for distributed physically-based hydrological models. Difficulties in the calibration of parameter values due to spatial heterogeneities are also revealed, as the use of piezometric data for the calibration of a hydrological model is rather innovative.