ADGEO Advances in Geosciences ADGEO Adv. Geosci. 1680-7359 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/adgeo-7-231-2006 Analysis on flood generation processes by means of a continuous simulation model Fiorentino M. 1 Gioia A. 2 Iacobellis V. 2 Manfreda S. 1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Fisica dell’Ambiente, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza, Italy Dipartimento di Ingegneria delle Acque e di Chimica, Politecnico di Bari, Italy 14 03 2006 7 231 236 Copyright: © 2006 M. Fiorentino et al. 2006 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ This article is available from https://adgeo.copernicus.org/articles/7/231/2006/adgeo-7-231-2006.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://adgeo.copernicus.org/articles/7/231/2006/adgeo-7-231-2006.pdf

In the present research, we exploited a continuous hydrological simulation to investigate on key variables responsible of flood peak formation. With this purpose, a distributed hydrological model (DREAM) is used in cascade with a rainfall generator (IRP-Iterated Random Pulse) to simulate a large number of extreme events providing insight into the main controls of flood generation mechanisms. Investigated variables are those used in theoretically derived probability distribution of floods based on the concept of partial contributing area (e.g. Iacobellis and Fiorentino, 2000). The continuous simulation model is used to investigate on the hydrological losses occurring during extreme events, the variability of the source area contributing to the flood peak and its lag-time. Results suggest interesting simplification for the theoretical probability distribution of floods according to the different climatic and geomorfologic environments. The study is applied to two basins located in Southern Italy with different climatic characteristics.