The objective of this thesis is to develop, test and validate methods, techniques and tools which can process and decompose hydrographs in order to understand, represent and predict the dynamics associated with these flow components in urbanized watersheds. The development of the methodology is based on rainfall and runoff data including qualitatives measures of the flow rate (conductivity, pH and turbidity) continuously acquired as part of the Field Observatory for Urban Hydrology (OTHU) for two watersheds in Lyon: Django Reinhardt (Chassieu) and Ecully. The continuous data collected in dry weather period from these two watersheds were analyzed using wavelets transforms. These methods combined to signal treatments analysis helped to reveal periodic component in the measured flows. These components were then characterized and used as a basis for developing a typology of hydrographs of dry weather period for each study site. Methods, techniques and tools for processing and analyzing of data sets and calibrating of rainfall-runoff models have been used to propose two models which represent respectively: (i) the component related to the runoff contribution for the two study sites and (ii.) the component related to parasitic water infiltration. The typology of hydrographs for dry weather period, the rainfall-runoff model and the infiltration-inflow model were implemented in a platform for hydrological modeling called “Hydrobox”. The simulated and the measured flow values were then compared. The comparison results show the importance of taking into account the particular signature carried by each component in order to improve the understanding and representing the dynamics related to hydrological processes in urbanized watersheds.
