Water Resources Status and Availability Assessment in Current and Future Climate Change Scenarios for Beas River Basin of North Western Himalaya

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The water resources status and availability of any river basin is of primary importance for overall and sustainable development of any river basin. This study has been done in Beas river basin which is located in North Western Himalaya for assessing the status of water resources in present and future climate change scenarios. In this study hydrological modelling approach has been used for quantifying the water balance components of Beas river basin upto Pandoh. The variable infiltration capacity (VIC) model has been used in energy balance mode for Beas river basin at 1km grid scale. The VIC model has been run with snow elevation zones files to simulate the snow module of VIC. The model was run with National Centre for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) forcing data (Tmax, Tmin, Rainfall and wind speed at 0.5degree resolution) from 1 Jan. 1999 to 31 Dec 2006 for calibration purpose. The additional component of glacier melt was added into overall river runoff using semi-empirical approach utilizing air temperature and glacier type and extent data. The ground water component is computed from overall recharge of ground water by water balance approach. The overall water balance approach is validated with river discharge data provided by Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) from 1994-2014. VIC routing module was used to assess pixel wise flow availability at daily, monthly and annual time scales. The mean monthly flow at Pandoh during study period varied from 19 -1581 m 3 /s from VIC and 50 to 1556 m 3 /sec from observation data, with minimum water flow occurring in month of January and maximum flow in month of August with annual R 2 of 0.68. The future climate change data is taken from CORDEX database. The climate model of NOAA-GFDL-ESM2M for IPCC RCP scenario 4.5 and 8.5 were used for South Asia at 0.44 deg. grid from year 2006 to 2100. The climate forcing data for VIC model was prepared using daily maximum and minimum near surface air temperature, daily precipitation and daily surface wind speed. The GFDL model also gives validation phase scenarios from 2006 to 2015, which are used to test the overall model performance with current data. The current assessment made by hydrological water balance based approach has given reasonable good results in Beas river basin. The main limitation of this study is lack of full representation of glacier melt flow using fully energy balance model. This component will be addressed in coming time and it will be integrated with tradition hydrological and snowmelt runoff models. The other limitation of current study is dependence on NCEP or other reanalysis of climate forcing data for hydrological modelling, this leads to mismatch between actual and simulated water balance components. This problem can be addressed if more ground based and fine resolution grid based hydro meteorological data are used as input forcing data for hydrological modelling.

Twenty-first-century glacio-hydrological changes in the Himalayan headwater Beas River basin

“…For the temperature increase, the uncertainty spread from DBC is much wider than that from LOCI, especially under RCP8.5 for the late future (2080-2099). It is very likely that the upper Beas basin will get warmer and wetter compared to the historical period, which is also confirmed by other studies (e.g., Aggarwal et al, 2016;Ali et al, 2015). Under DBC RCP8.5, the temperature increases the most, while for precipitation, the LOCI RCP8.5 increases the most.…”

“…To investigate the climate change impact on the future hydrological cycle, the variables produced by GCMs are usually dynamically downscaled by using a regional climate model (RCM) or downscaled using empirical-statistical methods for use as inputs in hydrological models. These approaches are adopted because the outputs of GCMs are too coarse to directly drive hydrological models at regional or basin scales, in particular over mountainous terrain (Akhtar et al, 2008). However, RCM simulations have systematic biases resulting from an imperfect representation of physical processes, numerical approximations, and other assumptions (Eden et al, 2014;Fujihara et al, 2008;Anand et al, 2017).…”

“…Hydrological models have been developed and are being used as the main tool to estimate the impacts of climate change on water resources. However, most hydrological models either do not have a representation of glaciers (Ali et al, 2015;Horton et al, 2006;Stahl et al, 2008) or have a simple glacier representation (i.e., crude assumptions with intact glacier cover, 50 % or no glacier cover) (Akhtar et al, 2008;Hasson, 2016;Aggarwal et al, 2016).…”

A case study for the assessment of the suitability of gridded reanalysis weather data for hydrological simulation in Beas river basin of North Western Himalaya

“…Soil data were obtained from National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning (NBSS&LUP) at 1:250,000 scale ( Fig. 2d) (Aggarwal et al 2016). The vegetation classes for this study area obtained from AVHRR global 1 km land cover product are water, snow, grassland, orchards/vineyards, deciduous forest, evergreen forest, cropland and shrubland.…”

Training, Education, Research and Capacity Building Needs and Future Requirements in Applications of Geospatial Technology for Water Resources Management

“…In the last 50 years, ever since the launch of Landsat in 1970s, and IRS in 1990s, the efforts are made to include/integrate GST with traditional methods of WRM by, using RS based Land Use Land Cover (LULC) map, generation of soil map and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for estimating runoff potential and soil erosion of an area (Garg et al, 2012), ground water potential mapping, soil erosion, sediment yield and reservoir sedimentation assessment (Lilhare et al, 2014, Rawat et al, 2017, Foteh et al, 2018Prasad et al, 2018), watershed delineation using DEM, economic and hydrologic evaluation of watershed management plans (Rao et al, 1994;Sharma and Thakur, 2007), flood and drought mapping, monitoring and damage assessment (Thakur and Sumangala, 2006; Corresponding author 2014, 2017), snow cover and glacier mapping and monitoring (Joughin et al, 2010;Kulkarni et al 2010;Bhambari and Bolch, 2011;Kumar et al, 2011;Thakur et al, 2012;Aggarwal et al, 2014;Nikam et al, 2017;Thakur et al, 2017a,b), irrigated area and irrigation infrastructure mapping and monitoring (Roy et al, 2010;Nikam and Aggarwal, 2012;NRSC, 2018), irrigation water and supply requirement (Durga Rao et al, 2001), assessment of land use land cover & climate change impact on water availability (Aggarwal et al, 2012;Aggarwal et al, 2016;Garg et al, 2017;Nikam et al, 2018). Most of these applications are driven by optical RS till mid-1990s, and addition of active Microwave (MW) remote sensing after mid-1990's and early 2000, with launch of ERS-1, 2 and Radarsat series of satellites (Britannica-2018, www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-satellites-2024625).…”