Hydrological control of flooding: Tuscany, October 1992

In the study of flash-flood occurrence in small catchments the lack of flow measurements is often one of the main limiting factors. Prior to estimating the forecasting potentialities and techniques for such events, an accurate reconstruction of past event flood dynamics is first required. This issue is here addressed by analyzing, with the use of a distributed hydrological model, the hydrometeorological conditions in which a severe flash-flood occurred, on October 1992, on a 48 square kilometers catchment in the Arno basin. Such an event was caused by the persistence of intense convective clusters on the background of widespread rain bands of frontal origin. The distributed hydrological model here adopted is devoted to simulate the evolution and the variability of the primary processes involved in the runoff cycle. Together with the hydrological model structure, other particular aspects of the event reconstruction procedure are discussed: the managing and processing of the information coming from different sensors, with different temporal and spatial resolutions; the identification of local precipitation dynamics (frontal or convective) within small areas of integrated radar and rain gauges data fields; the interpolation of rain gauge data on the basis of the radar-estimated spatial correlation. The results of the distributed modeling, concerning the estimate of the flood wave at various sites, are compared with analogous results obtained with simpler lumped models.