Rainstorm and flooding characteristics and simulated analysis in the Loess Plateau, China

In recent years, human activities have caused significant changes in the underlying surface and affected the processes of rainstorms and floods. It is of great practical significance for water resources management to understand the mechanism of the rainstorm and flood process under the changing conditions of land use and cover change (LUCC) and grasp the change law of the rainstorm and flood. Given this, this study aims to take the flood simulation of the Kuye River basin in the Loess Plateau as an example, selecting the measured flood data for the last 60 years (1960–2018) for statistical analysis and then illustrating the effect of the LUCC on the storm flooding using the distributed time varying gain hydrological model (DTVGM). The primary outcomes are as follows: (1) The statistical results show that the four rainstorm indicators of the annual maximum one-hour precipitation, the annual maximum precipitation, the number of days with ≥ 25 mm precipitation, and the number of days with ≥ 50 mm precipitation have no apparent increasing trend during the study period. (2) During the study period, the most significant annual flood peak discharge and the frequency of heavy and moderate floods in the basin decreased significantly (p