Abstract
Surface water storage—including wetlands and other small
waterbodies—has largely been disregarded in traditional hydrological
models. In this paper, the grid resampling method is adopted to study
the influence of the digital elevation model (DEM) grid resolution on
depression storage (DS) considering different rainfall return periods.
It is observed that the DEM grid size highly affects DS, and the higher
the grid resolution is, the larger the DS value. However, when the grid
resolution reaches a certain value, the maximum DS value decreases. This
suggests that a critical grid resolution value exists at which the water
storage capacity of depressions is maximized, namely, 20 m in this work.
This phenomenon is further verified in two test cases with and without
the infiltration process, i.e., calculations of the local area and
without infiltration area, respectively. This research may facilitate
the accurate computation of the DS process, which is greatly affected by
the grid resolution, thereby improving the reliability of hydrological
models.