Implementation of Distributed Hydrological Modeling in a Semi-Arid Mediterranean Catchment Azzaba, Morocco

The typical Mediterranean climate is marked at certain times of the year by sudden torrential rains causing high water flows, which leads to heavy flooding and hydroclimatic fluctuations due to a semi-arid climate. This explains the need for hydrological modeling for water resource management in these contexts. This work concerns the hydrological modeling of the Azzaba catchment area in Haut-Sebou “Morocco”. In the first part of this work, a bibliographic synthesis was carried out to characterize certain factors (physical, geological and climatic), and a hydrological study was carried out by processing rainfall and hydrometric data from the considered time periods. Ultimately, the use of the “ATHYS” platform is beginning to reproduce the flows at the Azzaba outlet. This model is really applicable in the semi-arid context based on several studies carried out on these contexts, since it has to consider the chronological sequence of phenomena on one hand and the influence of the climatic and physicalhydrogeological parameters of the basin (humidity and soil exchange) on the other. Several criteria were used in this study to estimate the model performance; the most common is Nash-Sutcliffe. After observation and analysis of the overall results, it can be concluded that the model reproduces flows in the Azzaba River watershed well, especially in event mode (mean Nash-Sutcliffe value of 0.71). The use of a historical meteorological time series to simulate flow using a daily time step gives average results with a Nash of 0.50, which strengthens the reliability of the ATHYS platform in the Mediterranean climate area.