Droughts and Floods

In this study, an attempt has been made to study the characteristics of short interval rainfall data of the Punpun river basin lying in Bihar-Jharkhand, which has been identified as the representative basin for the NIH- Centre for Flood Management Studies, Patna. The estimation of flood peaks for small catchments is required for water resources planning, flood forecasting, design of various drainage systems, flood control and design of hydraulic structures.

Jagatguru Shankaracharya Swami Swaroopanand of Dwarkapeeth sent his personal emissary Swami Dharanand to convey his support to Dr. G.D. Agrawal whose third fast-unto-death to ensure the natural flow in river Bhagirathi (Ganga) from Gangotri to Uttarkashi entered its second day. Yesterday (July 21) Swami Ramdev spent an hour in the evening with Dr. Agrawal and offered his full support.

With the failure of monsoons in Rajasthan and dry-up of the Bilaspur dam, the water situation assumes graver proportions in most parts of Rajasthan, besides Jaipur, Tonk and adjacent districts. These areas, now in the news for acute water shortage problems, have always depended upon monsoons for their traditional rainwater-harvesting systems and the riverine sources.

While the Government has taken remedial measures with construction of tube-wells across the rural and drought-prone areas, they have been sporadic and insufficient at their best.  Merely announcing relief measures and planning of schemes on paper as an immediate disaster management strategy are not solutions to mitigation of water problems in this State.

 Ghodadoha is a rock-filled earthen dam located in one of the tributaries of the Rushikuliya river of Orissa.

The report attempts drought characterization in arid and semi-arid climatic regions of India. Drought frequency and intensity are a function of the dimensionless climatic parameter derived as a ratio of mean annual potential evapotranspiration to mean annual precipitation (Ep/Pa).

In this study, regional flood frequency relationships have been developed using L-moments for South Bihar, in the alluvial plains of Indo-Gangetic basin and Kaimur-Chhotanagpur Santhal Pargana plateau. The annual maximum peak flood data of twenty-two gauging sites whose catchment areas vary from 11.7 to 3171 sqkm have been used. The mean annual peak floods of these sites vary from 29.15 cumec to 1293.2 cumec. Comparative regional flood frequency analysis studies have been carried out using some of the commonly used frequency distributions viz Extreme Value (EV1), General Extreme Value (GEV), Normal, Log Pareto (GPA) and Wakeby based on L-moments approach.

Floods are common in most parts of India particularly during the monsoon season. Flood control and mitigation involves flood plain mapping, zoning, insuring and warning systems as floods cannot be avoided. These measures minimize damage and loss in terms of life and property. In this regard real-time data based decision supports systems (DSS) are crucial for effective flood management.

The report, a part of the regular work programme of the Flood Studies Division of the National Institute of Hydrology presents a literature review on modeling debris flow. Occurrence of debris flows is a common natural phenomenon and denotes the rapid flow of debris with sufficient water to disperse grains uniformly throughout the entire depth. Dam break flows, landslides and flows in a mountainous terrain are some of the examples.

In this study, an attempt has been made to develop a regional flood formula using L-moments for the north Brahmaputra river system. The annual maximum peak flood data of twelve gauging sites of the north bank tributaries of the river have been considered. The screening of the data has been carried out for assessing the suitability of the data for regional flood frequency analysis by computing the Discordancy Measure (Di) in terms of L-moments. Also, homogeneity of the region has been tested using the L-moment based heterogeneity measure, H.

The study evaluates the applicability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in rainfall-runoff process modeling for the Ajay river basin, Jharkhand to predict the 6-hour ahead runoff at Sarath. Initially three flood events were considered for training, to find out the weights between different layers of the network. The back propagation algorithm has been used for optimization of weights. The developed ANN was validated for rest of the flood events.