Developing a Coupling Model System of Global Rainfall Data and Open-Source Model for Water Forecast in Poorly Gauged Basins

Water security is under severe pressures from human interventions and climate change in all over the world and improved water forecast is essential for water management. HYPE is a semi-distributed hydrographic model, running on Windows or Linux operating systems. The code of the model is written by the Fortran programming language and open source as Lesser GNU Public License. HYPE has been becoming a widely used tool in the forecasting of transboundary flows. However, the application of HYPE encounters many difficulties in processing input data and serving the construction, calibration, and validation of the model. This article introduces the development of the V-HYPE tool that helps a couple of global rainfall data and HYPE model for operational use. V-HYPE allows developing a user-friendly interface and setting parameters of the HYPE model as well as evaluating errors and transforming and visually displaying the results of the model. Besides, the V-HYPE has the ability to show related maps (i.e. sub-basins, river network, lake, and dams, etc), set up input data, automatically download global rainfall data, and visually display results on WebGIS. V-HYPE also can generate bulletins supporting for operational water resources warning and forecasting works in Vietnam. The utilities of this tool are demonstrated in the case study of Serepok river basin.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.