Evaluating the Performance of HEC-HMS and SWAT Hydrological Models in Simulating the Rainfall-Runoff Process for Data Scarce Region of Ethiopian Rift Valley Lake Basin

A number of physically-based and distributed watershed models have been developed to model the hydrology of the watershed. For a specific watershed, selecting the most suitable hydrological model is necessary to obtain good simulated results. In this study, two hydrologic models, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and Hydrological Engineering Centre-The Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS), were applied to predict streamflow in Katar River basin, Ethiopia. The performances of these two models were compared in order to select the right model for the study basin. Both models were calibrated and validated with stream flow data of 11 years (1990-2000) and 7 years (2001-2007) respectively. Nash-Sutcliffe Error (NSE) and Coefficient of Determination (R2) were used to evaluate efficiency of the models. The results of calibration and validation indicated that, for river basin Katar, both models could simulate fairly well the streamflow. SWAT gave the model performance with the R2 > 0.78 and NSE > 0.67;and the HEC-HMS model provided the model performance with the R2 > 0.87 and NSE > 0.73. Hence, the simulated streamflow given by the HEC-HMS model is more satisfactory than that provided by the SWAT model.