Understanding and modeling of hydrological processes
The MARINE model is built on the basis of research conducted at the IMFT. It has shown satisfactory performances in flood forecasting on many catchments of the Mediterranean area, both with fine spatial resolution data, and with coarser data but globally available.
The hydrological processes at the origin of flash floods are still poorly understood. A better understanding of these processes is an essential step to be able to improve the representations accordingly. To this end, several studies using the distributed hydrological model dedicated to flash floods MARINE have been conducted on instrumented catchments of the Mediterranean area, including spatial and temporal sensitivity analyses of the model to input parameters (Garambois et al., Journal of Hydrology, 2015). These results highlight the different flow dynamics that are successively activated during a flood. The MARINE hydrological model is used as a tool to analyze hydrological processes in order to improve their understanding. The following research axes are developed in particular:
- To finely characterise the formation and dynamics of overland and subsurface flows (Douinot et al., Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2018)
- Highlight the hydrological behavior(s) of a given catchment,
- Evaluate the role and importance of data at different spatial and temporal scales and identify in particular which data are able to best constrain the model and reduce uncertainty,
- Identify developments that could improve the structure of the model.
