Hydrological modelling through SWAT over a Himalayan catchment using high-resolution geospatial inputs

Abstract

The concerns of water availability have been increasing due to population explosion, rapid industrialization, and other anthropogenic activities. This urges for an accurate estimation of streamflow at the river basin scale, which is typically carried out by the application of rainfall-runoff models. Though numerous models exist in hydrology literature, their efficiency over the mountainous catchments is generally observed to be poor, mostly due to the lack of high-quality data over such regions. This study presents an application of the widely used soil and water assessment tool (SWAT)-based hydrological modelling using high-resolution geospatial inputs over the Tehri reservoir catchment (India) located in the lower Himalayan region. The Resourcesat-2 Linear Imaging Self-Scanning System (LISS)-IV imageries of land use/land cover (LULC) and the Cartosat-1 digital elevation model (DEM) are procured from National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), India. The LULC and DEM have a spatial resolution of 5.8 m and 2.5 m, respectively. SWAT model is applied for a duration of 12 years (2006-2017) with 2006, 2007-2013 and 2014-2017 as the warm-up, calibration and validation periods, respectively. The results reveal an excellent performance of the model in streamflow simulation. The efficacy measures viz., Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and Coefficient of determination (R2) are obtained to be 0.83 and 0.84, respectively. The information reported in this study will be helpful to the water resources engineers for hydrologic modelling over the mountainous catchments.