Rainfall and runoff estimation using hydrological models and Ann techniques

Abstract

Water is one of the most important natural resources and a key element in the socio-economic development of a State and Country. Water resources of the world in general and in India are under heavy stress due to increased demand and limitation of available quantity. Proper water management is the only option that ensures a squeezed gap between the demand and supply. Rainfall is the major component of the hydrologic cycle and this is the primary source of runoff. Worldwide many attempts have been made to model and predict rainfall behaviour using various empirical, statistical, numerical and deterministic techniques. They are still in research stage and needs more focussed empirical approaches to estimate and predict rainfall accurately. Various spatial interpolation techniques to obtain representative rainfall over the entire basin or sub-basins have also been used in the past. In the present work, estimation of mean rainfall over the Mahanadi basin lying in Odisha and its sub-basins has been done using different deterministic and geo-statistical methods including nearest neighbourhood, Spline, Inverse-distance weighting, and Kriging techniques. Different thematic maps for the study area have been developed for water resources assessment, planning and development analysis.