• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.39 no.6 s.167
• /
• pp.487-494
• /
• 2006

The flood discharge on the rising limb of a hydrograph at Hwawon station greatly differs from the flood discharge on the falling limb for the same stage. When there is such a big hysteresis, there can be a significant amount of errors in the rated discharge obtained from a simple rating curve. To reduce errors in rated discharges, a looped rating curve was established for Hwawon station in the Nakdong River. In order to compute the deviation between real discharges and simply rated discharges, a simple rating curve was established using the stage and discharge data from the results of a hydraulic channel routing. The relationship between the discharge deviation ${\Delta}Q$ and a product of B and ${\Delta}h/{\Delta}t$ was analysed, where B is the channel topwidth; ${\Delta}h$ is the stage increment; At is the time increment. Strong relation between ${\Delta}Q$ and $B{\Delta}h/{\Delta}t$ was found. The discharges calculated from the relationship show differences by 10 % or less for the 7 observations out of 11 observations in 1997 whose stages exceeds 7 m. The observed discharges for the stages over 9 m in 1998 also show small difference with the discharges estimated from the loop rating curve. Looped rating curve is recommended, instead of the simple rating curve to reduce the errors of rated discharges for gauging stations like Hwawon, which has relatively large loop width.