Journal of Ecosystem & Ecography
Open Access

Abstract

Assessment of water availability in an area is an essential prerequisite for planning and proper utilisation of water resources by adopting suitable management practices. This task attains added importance and urgency in the era of dwindling per capita availability of utilisable water resources. In the present study, the ArcSWAT 2009 version of SWAT model is applied for the Ken basin to predict the water resources of the basin. ASTER based DEM is used for watershed delineation and topography map of the basin. TM datasets were classified using supervised classification to get the land use/land cover map of the study area. The entire Ken basin is divided into ten sub basins comprising 107 HRUs based on unique slope, soil and land cover classes. The sensitivity analysis revealed that Curve Number (CN2), Available Soil water content (Sol_Awc), Soil Depth (Sol_Z) and Soil Evaporation Compensation factor (ESCO) are more sensitive among the SWAT parameters in the study area. The SWAT model for the Ken basin is calibrated (1985-1996) and validated (1997-2009) using the observed discharge data at the Banda site. The Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) and RSR values obtained during calibration period are found to be 0.89 and 0.33 respectively and the same during validation period are 0.58 and 0.65 respectively, indicating satisfactory simulation of runoff from the study area. The validated SWAT model is used to find out water availability in various sub basins of the study area

Biography

P S Murty is presently pursuing his Masters in Water resources Development from Department of Water Resources Development and Management, IIT Roorkee as a trainee officer. He is serving as assistant engineer in National Water Development Agency, A Govt. of India organization studying the feasibility of Inter Linking of Rivers (ILR).