IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

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 experienced at a higher level within the drainage basin, and

the assessment of these impacts will require the availability of
Integrated water resource management planning is a the framework. Such a framework will require regular
comprehensive planning process, involving all stakeholders maintenance and updating to reflect fully the most accurate
within the drainage system, who together as a group, ground truth data and the infrastructure requirements for
cooperatively work towards identifying the water resource planning and management of the relevant planning
issues and concerns, as well as developing and implementing departments. Such a framework, once available, could be used
plans with solutions that are environmentally, socially and by all the line departments and updated by the relevant
economically sustainable at various levels of connectivity of departments which have designated jurisdiction over the data
the drainage system. entry.
It is important to understand that integrated water resource The development of Hydrologic Information System
management should not merely imply the maintenance of an component is logical response to meet the specific information
inventory of different activities to be undertaken within a technology needs of the various line departments. A
hydrological unit. It also requires the collation of relevant hydrologic information system consists of a hydrologic
information needed to evaluate the cause and effect of all the information database coupled with tools for acquiring data to
proposed actions within the drainage basin. The watershed is fill the database and tools for analyzing, visualizing and
the smallest unit where the evaluation of man induced impacts modeling the data contained within it.
upon natural resources becomes possible.
This GIS portal (http://gisserver.civil.iitd.ac.in), for the
Since a watershed is considered as the smallest unit of a general user, exposes Web Mapping Application for accessing
drainage basin, a hydrological framework that can keep track Hydrological Information and Web based Interface
of the inter-connection of these units is essential. The impact applications based on the SWAT Modeling.
resulting from action taken at the watershed level will be

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IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

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

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IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

feature class are overlaid over village boundary. By using on which watershed the scheme is operating and the
identify button on the Irrigation scheme location, along with beneficiary village with population. Similarly many such
the attribute data of this feature class, it possible to obtain the applications can be demonstrated using this frame work
attribute data of all the feature class below it. This helps the .
user to get the detail information about the irrigation scheme,

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 5.1 SWAT Model

Arc Hydro data model structure could not support the SWAT The Soil and Water Assessment tool (SWAT) [2] is a
model output which was essential for the present study. The continuous-time, spatially distributed simulator of water,
Arc Hydro data model was further extended to support SWAT sediment, nutrients and pesticides transport at a catchment
model output. The details of this development are out of scope scale. It runs on a daily time step. In SWAT, a basin is divided
of this paper. into a number of watersheds. Within each watershed, Soil and
Landuse maps are overlaid to create a number of unique
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IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

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

Fig. 4 User view of Indus basin

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IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

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

Fig.6 Web Based interface to analysis the model results

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IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308

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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