India

WASSAN (Watershed Support Services and Activities Network)

Location:         Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
Last Date:                15^th July 2010

Sustainability – this word has assumed tremendous importance today, in the context of “development”. The advancement of human civilization in terms of technology, economics and life-style is turning out to be lop-sided. It is being realized that the sheer amount of wastes generated by the present population, is becoming more and more unmanageable with each passing day.

The study attempts to compile and evaluate the status of metal pollution assessment through aquatic sediments in rivers and lakes. The introduction of metallic pollutants into a river, whether it is natural (erosion from its drainage basin) or artificial (anthropogenic), can occur in dissolved or particulate form.

In this report, a conceptual model is proposed and described for calculation of streamflow runoff arising from rainfall, snowmelt and glacier melt for the Himalayan basins.  The simple structure of the model is designed keeping in view the sparse network, the availability of data and topography of the Himalayan basins. The model is based on the area-elevation characteristics of the watershed and utilizes the relationships describing the temperature lapse rates and orographic precipitation distribution.

The methods of pump test analysis reviewed in this report has been classified as traditional, computer based and new graphical. Quantitative data on hydraulic characteristics of aquifers including transmissivity and storativity are essential to the understanding and solution of aquifer problems and the proper evaluation and utilization of groundwater resources.

The report is an attempt to compile the procedures for systematic processing of rainfall data. The concepts of rainfall data processing have been discussed. It provides computer programs that are meant for processing and analysis of rainfall data collected from various sources. Different well documented computer programs, their description with input specifications and test input are given in the report.

The study looks at soil moisture movement and recharge to groundwater using nuclear methods like tritium tagging. It estimates the recharge to groundwater due to monsoon rain and irrigation through the unsaturated porous media in case of cultivated and uncultivated fields.

In this study, the modified version of the Soil Conservation Services-Curve Number (SCS-CN) by Mishra and Singh (1998a) was employed to the data of 14 watersheds falling in the arid (Rajasthan) and 2 watersheds in the sub-humid (Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh) regions of India and the results were compared with those of the existing SCS-CN method. The modified version is found to perform better than the existing SCS-CN method in all applications to the data of 16 watersheds.

The study attempts to apply the Shuffled Complex Evolution Algorithm (SCE-UA) of Duan et al for the calibration of a Conceptual Rainfall Runoff (CRR) model. CRR modeling lies intermediate between physically based models and black box models. 

The report presents an interactive software that has been developed to not only provide design flood estimates for large as well as small sized catchments but also help the users analyse their historical rainfall-runoff records for calibration and validation of the various techniques for part or whole of the catchment and river reaches.