Research papersA new partitioning approach for nonlinear Muskingum flood routing models with lateral flow contribution

- A new partitioning approach is proposed for nonlinear Muskingum flood routing models.
- This is a systematic solution approach which improves the calibration performance more than 80%.
- A new measure is defined to terminate the optimization process.

In this study, a new partitioning approach is proposed for nonlinear Muskingum flood routing models with lateral flow contribution. The proposed approach is used to partition the inflow hydrograph into different sub-regions so that each sub-region can have its own model parameters. The main advantage of the proposed approach is its independence from any kind of user intervention during generation of the sub-regions. This is a general and systematic solution approach and may be applied to all of the flood routing applications based on the Muskingum model. Applicability of the proposed approach is evaluated by solving four flood routing applications by considering lateral flow contribution. Identified results indicated that the proposed approach can be effectively used to improve the model identification performance more than 80% in the Muskingum flood routing models.