The development and assessment of current capabilities of SWAT model for estimating water balance and assaying and exploring research opportunities in applied watershed modelling for impact assessment of climate and human activities: Modeling the Ganga River Basin
Abstract
The availability of freshwater has been recognized as a global issue, and the reliable quantification of it within the basin has been necessary to bolster the sustainable management. Conflicts between increasing irrigated agricultural area, commercial crops, shifting cultivation and ever increasing domestic and industrial demand has already been a cause of tension in the society over water in the Ganga River Basin, India. Moreover, the detrimental ramifications of alterations in climatic conditions and land use change are believed to be experienced above a broad extent of spatial scales. The assessment of the repercussions of future transformations in the climatic and landuse conditions on the hydrologic response has been indispensable to the interest of the stakeholders and decision makers for the accomplishment of various administration as well as adaptation policies.
For this purpose, a basin-scale SWAT model has been developed. Model validation exhibited that the simulated results have been consistent with the observed data, and indicate that the model has been competent in reproducing the seasonal dynamics of surface water and the hydrological features of the basin including the snow melt. The study also establishes that there has been a substantial reduction in overall water resources availability with respect to Virgin. With an end goal of rationalizing uncertainties and elect appropriate models, multi-criteria ranking technique has been employed. Ranking of RCMs has been done on its capability to simulate hydrologic components, i.e., runoff simulations, exercising Entropy and PROMETHEE-2 approach. For the monsoon months, future projected average annual streamflow reduces significantly (-50% to -10%), although the flows for post monsoon months has been projected to increase (10-20%). Contributions from snowmelt to surface runoff increase for the months November - March. Base flow and recharge are declining over the basin. Urbanization has been the topmost contributor to the increase in surface runoff and water yield. The investigation presents not only a dependable assessment but also the valuation of future alterations in individual hydrological components and will furnish the administrators with substantive information, a prerequisite for formulating ameliorative policies.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H33N2263A
- Keywords:
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- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1873 Uncertainty assessment;
- HYDROLOGY