Research and application of flood level calculation methods for mountain rivers: A case study of the Jialing River Channel Widening Project in Lueyang County

Abstract

Mountainous rivers, with their meandering and variable planes, undulating riverbeds, and rapidly rising and falling floodwaters, face numerous governance challenges. Particularly, there is a continuous need to explore and summarize method for more accurately calculating flood water surface lines and providing reliable support for flood control management strategies. Based on the county flood control strategy of "blocking upstream, dividing and expanding midstream, and draining downstream", and focusing on the Jialing River channel widening project in Lueyang County, traditional energy conservation equations were used to calculate flood water levels. Additionally, numerical simulations and river engineering experiments were employed for verification. These method were used to analyze the capacity of various proposed schemes to reduce the design standard flood levels. Ultimately, a safe, reliable, and economically reasonable recommended scheme was determined. This scheme addressed the key bottleneck caused by poor flood discharge, which led to backwater flooding, and enhanced the county's flood control capability from less than a 10-year flood event to withstanding a 15-year flood event in the main stream of the Jialing River. The combined use of multiple method not only provided technical support for the design of flood control engineering in Lueyang County but also offered valuable references for flood control management in other mountainous cities with similar characteristics.

Keywords

mountain rivers / flood level reduction / river channel widening / numerical simulation / river engineering experiments / combined application