Executive Summary : | This project proposal is envisaged to examine the potential of new geomorphological attributes depicting the geometric positions of the source (external) nodes and internal nodes i.e., the topology of the channel network, in reliable prediction of floods at ungauged headwater watersheds in entire India. These new attributes describe the information regarding emergence of 1st, 2nd or 3rd bifurcation nodes within the stream network as well as distances of those nodes from the outlet of a watershed. There is dearth of attempts to utilize these attributes in flood prediction studies, may be due to complexity involved in their extraction for a watershed. As a part of this project, a repository of these new attributes shall be created for more than 2000 catchments in entire India. This challenging task of deriving the attributes for those many catchments by considering various Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) products and multiple spatial resolutions (which can be achieved through resampling the DEMs) is not possible without the development of code or tool in GIS framework. Therefore, a Python based GIS code/tool shall be developed in this project which would make the extraction of new geomorphological attributes easy and less time consuming. Finally, the potential of new geomorphological attributes in design flood estimation at ungauged watersheds shall be assessed through classical regional flood frequency analysis approaches and synthetic unit hydrograph methods. The repository of new geomorphological attributes shall be available freely to other researchers so that they can use them in their hydro-geomorphological investigations such as studies related to geomorphological unit hydrographs, characterization of stream networks, fractal nature of channel networks, sensitivity related to demarcation of channel networks over DEM sources and resolutions etc. |