Assessing anthropogenic influence on the hydrology of small peri-urban catchments: Development of the object-oriented PUMMA model by integrating urban and rural hydrological models

- Development of a distributed hydrological model for peri-urban areas.
- Integrated object-oriented representation of urban and rural areas.
- Simulation of multi-outlet catchments with complex drainage systems.
- Urban areas mainly control small summer floods, rural areas large winter floods.
- Retention capacity of peri-urban catchments is larger than that of urban catchments.

SummaryDistributed hydrological models are useful tools for process understanding and water management, especially in peri-urban catchments where the landscape heterogeneity is large, caused by a patchwork of natural and urbanized areas. This paper presents the Peri-Urban Model for landscape MAnagement (PUMMA) built within the LIQUID® modeling framework, specifically designed to study the hydrology of peri-urban catchments. It combines rural and urban hydrological models, and is used for process understanding. The originality of PUMMA is to follow a fully object-oriented approach, for both model mesh building and process representation. Urban areas, represented by cadastral units and rural areas divided in Hydrological Response Units are thus modeled with different interacting process modules. This provides a detailed representation of the runoff generation on natural and impervious areas. Furthermore, the exchange between process modules facilitates the simulation of subsurface and overland flow, as well as groundwater drainage by sewer pipes. Several drainage networks can coexist and interact (e.g. via storm water overflow devices) and water can be stored in retention basins, which allows the modeling of complex suburban drainage systems with multiple outlets. The model is then applied to the Chaudanne catchment (2.7 km2), located in the suburbs of Lyon, France. The uncalibrated model results show the importance of surface runoff from impervious areas for summer events and flow contributions from rural zones for winter events. Furthermore, the model reveals that the retention capacity of the Chaudanne catchment is larger than for classical urban catchments due to the peri-urban character of the catchment.