Geographical information system (gis) for water resources management

IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308
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IC-RICE Conference Issue | Nov-2013, Available @ http://www.ijret.org 417
GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM (GIS) FOR WATER
RESOURCES MANAGEMENT
Nagraj S. Patil1
, A. K. Gosain2
1
Associate Professor, Civil Engineering Department, SDM College of Engg, & Tech. Dharwad
2
Professor, Civil Engineering Department, IIT Delhi, New Delhi
nagrajspatil@yahoo.com
Abstract
Water resources projects are inherited with overlapping and at times conflicting objectives. These projects are often of varied sizes
ranging from major projects with command areas of millions of hectares to very small projects implemented at the local level. Thus,
in all these projects there is seldom proper coordination which is essential for ensuring collective sustainability.
Integrated watershed development and management is the accepted answer but in turn requires a comprehensive framework that can
enable planning process involving all the stakeholders at different levels and scales is compulsory. Such a unified hydrological
framework is essential to evaluate the cause and effect of all the proposed actions within the drainage basins.
The present paper describes a hydrological framework developed in the form of a Hydrologic Information System (HIS) which is
intended to meet the specific information needs of the various line departments of a typical State connected with water related aspects.
The HIS consist of a hydrologic information database coupled with tools for collating primary and secondary data and tools for
analyzing and visualizing the data and information. The HIS also incorporates hydrological model base for indirect assessment of
various entities of water balance in space and time. The framework would be maintained and updated to reflect fully the most
accurate ground truth data and the infrastructure requirements for planning and management.
Keywords: Hydrological Information System (HIS); WebGIS; Data Model; Web Mapping Services
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1. INTRODUCTION
Integrated water resource management planning is a
comprehensive planning process, involving all stakeholders
within the drainage system, who together as a group,
cooperatively work towards identifying the water resource
issues and concerns, as well as developing and implementing
plans with solutions that are environmentally, socially and
economically sustainable at various levels of connectivity of
the drainage system.
It is important to understand that integrated water resource
management should not merely imply the maintenance of an
inventory of different activities to be undertaken within a
hydrological unit. It also requires the collation of relevant
information needed to evaluate the cause and effect of all the
proposed actions within the drainage basin. The watershed is
the smallest unit where the evaluation of man induced impacts
upon natural resources becomes possible.
Since a watershed is considered as the smallest unit of a
drainage basin, a hydrological framework that can keep track
of the inter-connection of these units is essential. The impact
resulting from action taken at the watershed level will be
experienced at a higher level within the drainage basin, and
the assessment of these impacts will require the availability of
the framework. Such a framework will require regular
maintenance and updating to reflect fully the most accurate
ground truth data and the infrastructure requirements for
planning and management of the relevant planning
departments. Such a framework, once available, could be used
by all the line departments and updated by the relevant
departments which have designated jurisdiction over the data
entry.
The development of Hydrologic Information System
component is logical response to meet the specific information
technology needs of the various line departments. A
hydrologic information system consists of a hydrologic
information database coupled with tools for acquiring data to
fill the database and tools for analyzing, visualizing and
modeling the data contained within it.
This GIS portal (http://gisserver.civil.iitd.ac.in), for the
general user, exposes Web Mapping Application for accessing
Hydrological Information and Web based Interface
applications based on the SWAT Modeling.

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2. MAJOR ELEMENTS OF THE FRAMEWORK
The steps taken in the development of framework for water
resource information system include: 1.Geodatabase Design
and Implementation 2. Generationof indirect information
through simulation3. Dissemination of information through
GIS server
The common framework for water resources planning and
management requires creation of base layers at different scales
so as to cater to the relevant problems at the respective scales.
However, it is imperative that all these scales should merge
through the GIS environment for aggregation and integration
to be possible. It is intended to provide this framework at the
State level and with implementation at various departments
connected with water resources. The major elements of the
framework include as show in the figure 1
Fig.1 Framework of Hydro Geodatabase
Arc Hydro data model could only meet the basic
information[6][7]. The Geodatabase was extended to capture
the information related to administrative area, Landuse, soil
feature class and non spatial data related to socio-economic.
Hydrography Dataset was also further extended to capture
some of the feature class like Dam, Canal, Water
Body,Borewell, Hydro Projects, Irrigation Scheme, Water
Supply Scheme, Sewage Treatment Plant, Industry,Rain gauge
and Monitoring Point.Dam feature class is related with non-
spatial data like Area Capacity, Water utilization, Sesimacity
of Area, Reservoir (static data), Reservoir Water level, Power
Projects. Canal feature class is related with non-spatial data
like Canal Dimension and Discharge. Borewell feature class is
related with non-spatial data like Discharge, Groundwater
Table and Water Quality Parameter. Sewage treatment plant
feature class is related with non-spatial data like
sewagetreatment plant discharge. Water treatment plant
feature class is related Water Quality Parameters and Pump
Station.
Drainage Line and Area Dataset consist of Basin,Catchment,
Sub-Catchment, Watershed and drainage line. Administrative
Dataset consist of feature class like State, District, Tehsil, and
Village. Landuse and Soil dataset contains Landuse and Soil
feature class.
Other non-spatial data like Demography, Livestock data are
collected from village and aggregated up to district level.
Irrigated Area, Agriculture Area, Crop, Fertilizer, and
Pesticide data are collected at the district level.
3. GIS SERVER
In different line departments it is a real challenge to minimize
redundancy while ensuring that the right data is accessible in a
timely and efficient manner. With hundreds of remote offices
and thousands of internal and external GIS users at different
levels of expertise and needs, it is important to overcome
multiple barriers while designing enterprise GIS [9].
One solution is to implement a server-based GIS that could
cope with all the above desired attributes[10]. The aggregation
of information should be done at central place by placing a
GIS server and database server for the purpose. Server-based
GIS can be defined as centrally hosted GIS computing.
Internal GIS capabilities are shared with users in the
department network while a Web-based platform is also
maintained for external users.[11] GIS users are connected to
the central GIS servers using desktop GIS software, Web
browsers, and custom applications as depicted in Figure 2.
4. WEB INTERFACE FOR WATER RESOUCES
APPLICATIONS
In the present study the Hydro Geodatabase has been
implemented on Himachal Pradesh state as a case. The
principal departments that are responsible for water resources
development in Himachal Pradesh for various purposes are the
Irrigation and Public Health Department (IPH), Agriculture
Department, Rural Development Department (RD), Forest
Department (FD).
A wide range of applications relevant for the planning and
management of water resources is demonstrated using this
framework built at the macro level as well as some patches
developed at the larger scales. This web portal can be accessed
by the request of the URL http://gisserver.civil.iitd.ac.in
4.1 IPH Department
As part of the demonstration, information from the IPH
department pertaining to their activities was incorporated in
the Web based GIS portal. The figure 3 shows Web based
Mapping Application on the irrigation schemes being operated
by IPH department in respective village. It shows the
Watershed boundary, drainage line, Irrigation scheme location

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feature class are overlaid over village boundary. By using
identify button on the Irrigation scheme location, along with
the attribute data of this feature class, it possible to obtain the
attribute data of all the feature class below it. This helps the
user to get the detail information about the irrigation scheme,
on which watershed the scheme is operating and the
beneficiary village with population. Similarly many such
applications can be demonstrated using this frame work
.
Fig.2 Enterprise Wide Application Configuration
Fig. 3 Information of the Irrigation Schemes operated in the state by IPH
5. MODEL BASE TO HYDRO GEODATABASE
Arc Hydro data model structure could not support the SWAT
model output which was essential for the present study. The
Arc Hydro data model was further extended to support SWAT
model output. The details of this development are out of scope
of this paper.
5.1 SWAT Model
The Soil and Water Assessment tool (SWAT) [2] is a
continuous-time, spatially distributed simulator of water,
sediment, nutrients and pesticides transport at a catchment
scale. It runs on a daily time step. In SWAT, a basin is divided
into a number of watersheds. Within each watershed, Soil and
Landuse maps are overlaid to create a number of unique

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hydrologic response units(HRUs). SWAT simulates surface
and subsurface processes, accounting for snow fall and snow
melt, vadose zone processes (i.e., infiltration, evaporation,
plant uptake, lateral flows and percolation into aquifer).
Runoff volume is calculated using the Curve Number method.
Sediment yield from each sub-basin is generated using the
Modified Universal Soil Loss Equation (MUSLE) [13]. The
model updates the C factor of the MUSLE on a daily basis
using information from the crop growth module. The routing
phase controls the movement of water using the variable
storage method or the Muskingum method[3],[4].
6. CASE STUDY
Indus River in north India is selected for the present study.
The model set-up and runs were performed using SWAT
hydrological model. The GIS interface of this model
ArcSWAT provides an excellent platform for data
management and result analysis. In the present study, two
futuristic climate scenarios A2 and B2, and one baseline
scenario BL has been used to address the uncertainty issues.
Regional scale datasets used for model set-up were: land-use
from global land cover fraction, soil from FAO and terrain
model from SRTM.Primarily the water yield and
evapotranspiration component of water balance were modeled
for each of the sub-catchment. The modeled flow at the sub-
catchment outlets were also evaluated for the various
scenarios. To induce a level of confidence in the generated
results, the basin was modeled using Indian Meteorological
Department (IMD) gridded precipitation and temperature
datasets. A good comparison was found between the baseline
scenario (BL) results and observed dataset (IMD) results. This
investigation would provide a good basis for selecting
appropriate adaptation strategies to cater to the climate change
impacts.
SWAT model version 2.1.3 is run on the desktop system,
using the ArcGIS interface and the model results of Subbasin;
Reach for monthly and daily time step was imported to
Hydrological Information System (HIS) Geodatabase.
7. WEB BASE GIS INTERFACE FOR ANALYSIS
OF MODEL RESULTS
The web based Interface starts by the request of the URL
http://gisserver.civil.iitd.ac.in/natcom. This interface was
developed for viewing the model results of the respective Sub-
Catchment. Figure 4 shows the user view of Indus basin. The
user can zoom in further to view the catchment, sub-catchment
and to the watershed level. The standardization of this
drainage area was done by giving the unique identification
number at different levels. These unique identification number
along with sub-catchment name where used as reference for
further analysis. Figure 5 shows the Web Mapping services of
sub-catchment with unique identification number as their
labels.
Fig. 4 User view of Indus basin

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Fig.5 User view of Sub-Catchment with unique identification number as their labels
Figure 6 shows the web based interface to analysis the model
results. With this web based interface the user is given the
option of analysis the Catchment or Sub-Catchment or
Watershed by selecting it respectively, by selecting the radio
button side to it confirms the respective selection. The user is
also given the option to select the analysis of the SWAT
model results with the different data set like India
Meteorological Department (IMD) for the period of 1971 to
2005. HadRM3 baseline Scenario (BL) for the period 1961 to
1990, HadRM3 GHG Scenario A2 & B2 for the period 2071
to 2100. It is important to assess the behaviour of the drainage
area with and without man made intervention, so the web
based interface is also designed with this concern. SWAT
model gives many outputs parameters but only few parameters
like Water Balance components, Flow, Water Quality
parameters like Nitrite, Nitrate, Ammonium, Organic
Nitrogen, Organic Phosphorus, Mineral Phosphorus, CBOD
and Dissolved Oxygen, are given as option to user for
analysis. The user is also given the option for the selecting the
time during for the analysis. The selected parameters can be
viewed through graphs or tables. This web based interface
provides a robust frame platform for the assessing the status of
water resources.
Fig.6 Web Based interface to analysis the model results

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CONCLUSIONS
The development of a Geospatial Web Portal is proposed as
the best solution to Hydrological Information and Data
Management. The Web Portal built around a hydrological data
model synthesizes data from diverse sources describing the
water resource, provides visualization tools and link to
externally modeled results. This Geospatial Web Portal would
provide a robust platform for the planning, execution and
monitoring of status of water resources.
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