Hydrological modeling of rainfall-runoff of the semi-arid Aguibat Ezziar watershed through the GR4J model

Abstract The management of water resources requires as a first step the modeling of rainfall-runoff. It allows simulating the hydrological behavior of the basin for a good evaluation of the potentiality of this in terms of water production. There are different hydrological models used for water resource assessment, but conceptual models are still the most used due to their simple structure and satisfactory performance. In this study, t he performances of the conceptual model of rainfall and runoff (GR4J) modeled under R with the AirGR package, are used to Aguibat Ezziar the subbasin of the Bouregreg basin in Morocco. The enormous amount of data required and the uncertainty of some of the m makes these models of limited usefulness. The GR4J model allows evaluation of the runoff rates and describes the hydrological behavior of the Aguibat Ezziar watershed, which presents the aim behind writing this paper. A period from 2003 to 2017 has been selected. This period has been divided into two parts: one for calibration (2003-2006), and one for validation (2013-2016). After the calibration of the model and following the performance obtained (Nash higher than 0.72) we can say that the GR4J model behaves well in the Aguibat Ezziar catchment area.