Water Resources Management Plan for Ganga River using SWAT Modelling and Time series Analysis

Abstract:

Water resources management of the Ganga River is one of the primary objectives of National Ganga River Basin Environmental Management Plan. The present study aims to carry out water balance study and development of appropriate methodologies to compute environmental flow in the middle Ganga river basin between Patna-Farraka, India. The methodology adopted here are set-up a hydrological model to estimate monthly discharge at the tributaries under natural condition, hydrological alternation analysis of both observed and simulated discharge series, flow health analysis to obtain status of the stream health in the last 4 decades and estimating the e-flow using flow health indicators.

ArcSWAT, was used to simulate 8 tributaries namely Kosi, Gandak and others. This modelling is quite encouraging and helps to provide the monthly water balance analysis for all tributaries for this study. The water balance analysis indicates significant change in surface and ground water interaction pattern within the study time period

Indicators of hydrological alternation has been used for both observed and simulated data series to quantify hydrological alternation occurred in the tributaries and the main river in the last 4 decades,. For temporal variation of stream health, flow health tool has been used for observed and simulated discharge data. A detailed stream health analysis has been performed by considering 3 approaches based on i) observed flow time series, ii) observed and simulated flow time series and iii) simulated flow time series at small upland basin, major tributary and main Ganga river basin levels. At upland basin level, these approaches show that stream health and its temporal variations are good with non-significant temporal variation. At major tributary level, the stream health and its temporal variations are found to be deteriorating from 1970s. At the main Ganga reach level river health and its temporal variations does not show any declining trend. Finally, E- flows were computed in 2 ways computing monthly a) 10 % Mean Annual Flow b) E- flow values using Flow Health and found about 223 cumec and 238 cumec at Baltara (Kosi) gauging station respectively. It can be concluded that for large rivers like the Ganga, a combination of flow Health tool and hydrological modelling can be used for effective management of water resources.