Determination of Runoff Curve Numbers for the Growing Season Based on the Rainfall–Runoff Relationship from Small Watersheds in the Middle Mountainous Area of Romania

Abstract

The NRCS-CN (Natural Resources Conservation Service curve number) method, developed by the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) is among the most widely used for the estimation of surface runoff from watersheds. Ever since its introduction in the 1950s, although it has been used to a great extent by engineers and hydrologists, the applicability of the original procedure used to determine its main parameter, the curve number (CN), to various regions with diverse environmental conditions, is still subject to many uncertainties and debates. This study presents a comparative analysis of different methods applied to determine curve numbers from local data in four watersheds located in the central part of Romania, within the mountain region surrounding the Brașov Depression. The CN values were not only computed using rainfall–runoff records from 1991 to 2020, but also determined from the standard NRCS tables documented in the National Engineering Handbook part 630 (NEH-630), for comparison purposes. Thus, a total of 187 rainfall–runoff data records from the study watersheds and five different methods were used to assess the accuracy of various procedures for determining the CN values, namely: tabulated CN (CN values selected from NRCS tables, TAB), asymptotic fitting (AF) of both natural and ordered data, median CN (MD), geometric mean CN (GM) and the arithmetic mean CN (AM) methods. The applicability of the aforementioned methods was investigated both for the original fixed initial abstraction ratio λ = 0.2 and its adjustment to λ = 0.05. Relatively similar results were found for the curve number-based runoff estimates related to the field data analysis methods, yet slightly better when the λ was reduced to 0.05. A high overall performance in estimating surface runoff was achieved by most CN-based methods, with the exception of the asymptotic fitting of natural data and the tabulated CN method, with the latter yielding the lowest results in the study area.