Hydrological Modelling Studies of Paravar River Basin, a Tributary of River Godavari using HEC-HMS Model

Abstract

The Hydrologic Engineering Center’s Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) is designed to simulate the complete hydrologic processes of dendritic watershed systems. The software includes many traditional hydrologic analysis procedures such as event infiltration, unit hydrographs, and hydrologic routing. The model is applied to the Pravara River Basin, which is a tributary of the Godavari River in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra (India). For the simulation of runoff, the daily precipitation data and daily observed streamflow data from 1999 to 2012 was collected and ten years of data from 1999 to 2008 was used for the calibration of the model and 4 years of data from 2009 to 2012 was used for the validation of the model. The calibration of the HEC-HMS 4.0 model for the study area is carried out by comparing the simulated daily streamflow with the observed flow at the outlet of the basin. For this particular study, the deficit and constant loss model is used to compute the losses from the watershed. Under prediction of high flows is an inherent problem seen in hydrological modeling of the basin in the present study. This is due to the lack of extreme event modeling capability of the hydrological model. The daily flows except extreme flows are better simulated. The ability of HEC–HMS to simulate the magnitude of the peaks in extreme floods in the river basin underscores the significance of the model application as a flood prediction tool. The HEC–HMS successfully reproduced low flows and thus the model is a useful tool to estimate low flows in advance based on drought forecasts.