Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription or Fee Access

Hydrological Modeling of Natunhat Watershed, West Bengal of the Ajay River Catchment under Changed Climate Scenario

Sujana Dhar, Asis Mazumdar

Abstract


It is known that variability of climate has a pronounced impact on water supplies, instream conditions, aquatic habitat, flora and fauna. Global warming is altering ecology in complex ways. A study of soil moisture accounting parameters was conducted for the Ajay river catchment on the Natunhat watershed, West Bengal, to determine the water availability scenario under a climate change scenario. The key impacts of climate change in ecological and hydrological systems need to be assessed for future flow regimes. A distributed hydrological model HEC-HMS was used to quantify the impact of climate change on the water resources of the Ajay river catchment outlet at Natunha, after calibration using historical data and a GIS coupled with RS techniques. The study uses the HadRm daily weather data to determine the control (present) and GHG (future) water availability in space and time. A total of 15 years of simulation spanning the entire Ajay river catchment has been conducted. Five years were devoted to control (present) 1997–2001 and the remaining 10 years (2040–2050) devoted to GHG (future) climate scenario. Soil evapotranspiration, soil infiltration and canopy overflow are seen to decrease whereas canopy evapotranspiration increases over the projected period. Streamflow is seen to decrease by a maximum of 82.24% over the projected period of 2041-50 during the changed climate scenario.

Keywords


Soil Moisture Accounting, HEC HMS SMA, Ajay River Basin, Future water availability Scenario and Regional Climate Model, Climate change and ecological flow regime.

Full Text:

PDF


Disclaimer/Regarding indexing issue:

We have provided the online access of all issues and papers to the indexing agencies (as given on journal web site). It’s depend on indexing agencies when, how and what manner they can index or not. Hence, we like to inform that on the basis of earlier indexing, we can’t predict the today or future indexing policy of third party (i.e. indexing agencies) as they have right to discontinue any journal at any time without prior information to the journal. So, please neither sends any question nor expects any answer from us on the behalf of third party i.e. indexing agencies.Hence, we will not issue any certificate or letter for indexing issue. Our role is just to provide the online access to them. So we do properly this and one can visit indexing agencies website to get the authentic information. Also: DOI is paid service which provided by a third party. We never mentioned that we go for this for our any journal. However, journal have no objection if author go directly for this paid DOI service.