Surface Water

In the study, the hydrogeomorphological parameters of Myntdu basin have been estimated from a digitized basin map where basic map data could be retrieved and manipulated quickly and accurately. The estimated geomorphological parameters of the basin covering linear, areal and relief aspects will be helpful in estimating and modeling the flow process in the basin.

The study applies TOPMODEL (Topography Model) to the Malaprabha catchment of Krishna river basin in Karnataka to simulate the daily flows at Khanapur site. The catchment area of Malaprabha up to discharge measuring site Khanapur is 520 sqkm. The model uses topographic index for the formation of runoff through development of a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) by interpolating the contours in the basin at 300 m grid size.

The report describes the results of the study of arsenic pollution in groundwater in Nadia as well as the hydro-chemical study of the river Hoogly in West Bengal. The alluvial tract along the river Hoogly covering a stretch of around 470 km encompassing eight districts is affected by arsenic pollution of ground water, the source being geogenic.

The report describes a software developed by the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) for reservoir analysis in view of the importance of reservoir operation problem in the Indian context and the non-availability of generalized software for reservoir analysis.

The study attempts to estimate the recharge to groundwater due to rainfall and irrigation using tritium tagging techniques in parts of Narsinghpur district under the Narmada catchment in Madhya Pradesh. The estimation of recharge to groundwater is crucial to better water resources management, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions.

The Systems Hydrologique European – European Hydrological System (SHE) is a physically based distributed model and it provides a useful setup for understanding the importance of evaporation data and soil parameters. 

In this study, single column hydrologic simulations have been carried out for examining the sensitivity of this model to pan evaporation data of the various stations as well as the increase in conductivity of the unsaturated zone. Furthermore, the reduction in the value of exponent appearing in the Averjanov’s formula and reduction in the values of moisture content at wilting point and residual water content has been studied for a single grid of 2 km X 2 km size of the Narmada river.

The study attempts to explain flood wave propagation in natural and artificial channels within the perspective of site-specific rating curve. The study looks at the impacts of channel characteristics – bed slope, flood plains, channel shape, expansion-contraction combination, inactive storage, Manning’s roughness, expansion and contraction on flood wave propagation.

The report develops rainfall-runoff modeling for simulating and forecasting the flow from a catchment, and in determining the inflow series for the ungauged catchments on the basis of records of gauged catchments.

Because of the scarcity of data, mostly lumped models have been used to model the rainfall-runoff process in a catchment. However distributed models are more accurate and need to be adopted for modeling the complex processes at the scale of basins.

The study develops the wavelet element method for hydrological application purposes in general and modeling of flow in a canal due to breach of bank in particular. Due to high seasonal variability of rainfall and cyclones in coastal India, flood discharges cause frequent breaching of canals.

Canal breach modeling is of great significance in open channel hydraulics. The study of breach of a canal is a relatively new one as compared to dam breach, which is a well researched field. The analysis of the problem is complicated due to dynamics of flow within the canal. The limitations of the above model due to the one-dimensional model analysis of the problem is hoped to be overcome in two or three dimensional analysis.

The study applies a hydraulic simulation model, Hydrologic Engineering Centre (HEC-1) to Baitarni river for modeling hourly flows of the river at Anandapur gauging site. HEC-1 model had been developed by US Army Corps of Engineers, for rainfall-runoff modeling. It provides a powerful automatic optimization technique for estimation of some of the parameters. The optimization technique of the model has been utilized in the present study and model parameters have been calibrated and validated for the study area.