Abstract

Flood routing is a technique to determine the flood hydrograph at a point of downstream where is of great importance and flood-induced risks can cause irreparable damages. Routing methods can be classified into two categories: hydraulic routing and hydrologic routing. Hydrologic methods are less accurate than hydraulic methods but they are widely used for engineering of rivers due to simplicity and being acceptable. Muskingum is a simple, widely used hydrologic method in the flood routing. In present study, accuracy of the linear Muskingum method has been evaluated using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm in a Karun River reach bounded to the Mollasani hydrometric station and Ahwaz station upstream and downstream of the river, respectively. The results suggest that if three distinct values rather than constant values are used for X, K, Δt parameters in the Muskingum method, the accuracy of computed outflow will be increased particularly in the peak section of hydrograph so that the Mean Relative Error (MRE) of the peak hydrograph section was 2.44% when constants were. However, in the case of using three different values for these parameters, the error value reached 0.89%.