Analysis of the hydrological behaviour of an urbanizing basin

Suburban areas undergo rapid land‐use changes due to urban growth. Consequently, the mitigation of hydrological impacts is a major issue in the field of flood and water pollution management. Nevertheless, suburban catchments have seldom been studied. This paper presents a method for analyzing the hydrological behaviour of suburban catchments; the particular method is tested on the Chézine catchment, located in a suburban area of Nantes (western France). Chézine provides a typical example of a suburban catchment, yet features the unique behaviour of a response time ranging from 1 to 6 h. It is proposed herein to classify rainfall‐runoff events in homogeneous groups according to their flow coefficient. A group of events is characterized by its mean flow coefficient and by its transfer function, which are considered as the signatures of the hydrological behaviour of these similar events. The transfer function is identified from the available series of rainfall and outflow data. The identified transfer functions serve to estimate the localization of contributing zones over the basin by estimating the basin transfer function from flowpaths. The consistency of these assumptions is then verified by comparing the estimated transfer function with the identified one. The application of this method to the Chézine catchment demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish various types of hydrological behaviour regimes associated with significantly different transfer functions. The joint analysis of the flow coefficient and transfer function of each group confirms that the Chézine catchment reacts like an urban basin with just the urban zones contributing to runoff under dry conditions. Otherwise, the wetter the initial state, the greater the tendency of this basin to react like a natural basin, as reflected by the different transfer function shapes. These results confirm the validity of the proposed method to analyse the various behaviour regimes of suburban catchments. In addition, this method helps define the specifications of hydrological models suited to suburban catchments. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.