Abstract
Hydrological modeling is a commonly used tool by water resource planners to simulate the hydrological response in a basin due to precipitation for the purpose of management of basin water. With the increasing demand for limited water resources in every basin, careful management of water resources becomes more important. The Deduru Oya river in Sri Lanka supplies water to number of new and ancient irrigation systems and the management of water resources in the Deduru Oya river basin, which has an area of 2620 km2, is important for optimum utilization of water for these irrigation systems. This paper describes a case study of continuous rainfall-runoff modeling in part of the Deduru Oya basin with intra-basin diversions and storage irrigation systems using the Hydrologic Engineering Center – Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC–HMS) version 3.0.1 to estimate runoff in the Deduru Oya river. Long term daily rainfall data at several rain gauging stations, evaporation, land use and soil data in the river basin, daily river runoff at a stream gauging station, intra-basin diversions from the river into a storage reservoir, irrigation releases from the reservoir and drainage flow returned to the river from irrigation systems were used to set up the HEC-HMS model. Five-layer soil moisture accounting loss method, Clark unit hydrograph transformation method, and recession base flow method of the HEC-HMS model were used. Temporally varying irrigation water uses, storages and losses in the basin were taken into account in the analysis. The results depict the capability of HEC–HMS to reproduce stream flows in the basin to a high accuracy with averaged computed Nash Sutcliffe efficiencies of 0.80. The study demonstrates potential HEC–HMS application in flow estimation from tropical catchments with intra-basin diversions and irrigation storages. The model developed is a tool for water management in the Deduru Oya river basin. ENGINEER, Vol. 48, No.01, pp. 1-9, 2015
Highlights
Sustainable management of limited fresh water sources is a major challenge and is extremely important for the people living in the world
For the application of HEC-HMS, the DMW sub basin which has an area of 1950 km2 was divided into two sub-basins; DRB sub basin of an area of 1400 km2 above the irrigation diversion at Ridi Bendi Ela and rest of the DMW basin of an area of 550 km2 (Figure 2)
3.1 Calibration For the calibration period, which is from Oct – Dec 1985, simulated daily discharge values were compared with observed daily discharge values
Summary
Sustainable management of limited fresh water sources is a major challenge and is extremely important for the people living in the world. Failure to manage the water sources in an effective manner will adversely affect the society and the economy of the country. Management of water resources in a basin essentially requires understanding of dynamics of basin water and assessment of basin water availability for development use. Hydrological modeling is a commonly used tool to estimate the basin’s hydrological response due to precipitation. Various types of hydrological models from black box models which require less basin data to physically based models which require large amount of basin data have been developed [2]. The selection of the model depends on the basin and the objective of the hydrological prediction in the basin
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