Assignment-I

Ans 1(a): Hydrological cycle can be defined as the continuous process of

exchange of water from the earth surface to the atmosphere or vice versa by the
influence of solar radiation or solar heat.

It is a closed system where the water gets transformed either from one place to
other or from one form to other under the action of sun heat. Whatever be the
process, the total water in the whole system remains constant. The
representation of the hydrological cycle is represented in the figure below.

The hydrological cycle is involved in the total earth system. The total system can
be classified into three important zone: Atmosphere, hydrosphere and
lithosphere. Atmosphere forms the gaseous envelope that is above the
hydrosphere. Hydrosphere forms the body of water that is covering the surface of
the earth. The environment that is below the hydrosphere till the solid rock forms
the lithosphere.
The basic components of a hydrological cycle constitute:

1. Precipitation
2. Runoff
3. Evaporation
4. Condensation
5. Transpiration
6. Evapotranspiration
7. Infiltration
8. Depression Storage
9. Interception

1. Precipitation:

It is the fall of moisture from the atmosphere to the earth’s surface in any form.
Example: rain, hail, snow, sleet, glaze, drizzle, snowflakes.

2. Runoff:
It is the water flowing over the land making its way towards rivers, lakes, oceans,
etc. as surface or subsurface flow.

1. Surface runoff: it is the running water over the land and which ultimately
discharge water to the sea.
2. Subsurface runoff: The water getting infiltrated into pervious soil mass,
making its way towards rivers and lakes can be termed as subsurface
runoff.

3. Evaporation:

It is the conversion of natural liquids like water into gaseous form like air.
Evaporation happens in the water bodies
4. Condensation:

It is the conversion of a vapor or gas to a liquid. The water vapour evaporates

from the water bodies like ocean, sea and river. These vapors after reaching a
height around 20km in the sky undergo condensation and forms clouds. These
later precipitate as rain, fog etc.

5. Transpiration:

It is the evaporation taking place from any plant or greenery. For example, a
water droplet on a leaf getting evaporated into the atmosphere.

6.Evapotranspiration:

It is the combination of evaporation and transpiration.

7. Infiltration:

It is the process of filtration of water to the inner layers of soil based on its
structure and nature. Pervious soils go through more infiltration than impervious.
Infiltration in soils like sand, gravel and coarser material is more and for finer soil
particles like clay and silt, infiltration is less.

Infiltration is inversely proportional to runoff. In soil, if infiltration is less, then the

runoff is more. Similarly, more infiltration gives less runoff. Example: bitumen
roads have more runoff than metallic red mud roads

8. Depression Storage:

It is the part of precipitation required to fill depression zones of land.

9. Interception:

Part of precipitation required to wet the surface of soil, buildings and all pervious
surfaces is called Interception.
Process of Hydrological Cycle
The Process of the hydrological cycle starts with oceans. Water in oceans, gets
evaporated due to heat energy provided by solar radiation and forms water
vapor. This water vapor moves upwards to higher altitudes forming clouds.

Most of the clouds condense and precipitate in any form like rain, hail, snow,
sleet. And a part of clouds is driven to land by winds. Even during the process of
precipitation, some parts of water molecules may evaporate back to atmosphere.

The Portion of water that reaches the ground, enters the earth’s surface
infiltrating various strata of soil. This process enhances the moisture content as
well as the water table.

Vegetation sends a portion of water from the earth’s surface back to the
atmosphere through the process of transpiration. Once water percolates and
infiltrates the earth’s surface, runoff is formed over the land, flowing through the
contours of land heading towards river and lakes and finally joins into oceans
after many years. Some amount of water is retained as depression storage.

Further again the process of this hydrological cycle continues by blowing of cool
air over the ocean, carrying water molecules, forming into water vapor then
clouds getting condensed and precipitates as rainfall. Similarly, the water
percolates into the soil, thus increasing the water table and also the formation of
runoff waters heading towards water bodies. Thus, the cyclic process continues.

Water balance Equation

As per the water balance equation, the sum of inflow waters = sum of outflow
waters. Out of the three processes precipitation, runoff, and evaporation, inflow
is precipitation. Runoff and evaporation come under outflow, then the water
balance equation can be written as,

Precipitation – runoff = Evaporation

That gives,
Precipitation (P) = Evaporation (E) + Runoff (R)
 THE WATER BUDGET EQUATION

The water-budget equation is simple, universal, and adaptable because it relies on

few assumptions on mechanisms of water
movement and storage. A basic water budget for a small watershed can be
expressed as:
P + Qin = ET + ∆S + Qout (A1)
where
P is precipitation,
Qin is water flow into the watershed,
ET is evapotranspiration (the sum of evaporation from soils,
surface-water bodies, and plants),
∆S is change in water storage,
and
Qout is water flow out of the watershed.

The elements in equation A1 and in all other water-budget equations are referred
to as components in this report. Water-budget
equations can be written in terms of volumes (for a fixed time interval), fluxes
(volume per time, such as cubic meters per day or acre-feet per year), or flux
densities (volume per unit area of land surface per time, such as millimeters per
day). With the approach used by those authors, it is assumed that Q in is zero and
Qout is equal to runoff.

Equation A1 can be refined and customized depending on the goals and scales of
a particular study. Precipitation can be written as the sum of rain, snow, hail,
rime, hoarfrost, fog drip, and irrigation. Water flow into or out of the site could be
surface or subsurface flow resulting from both natural and human-related causes.
Evapotranspiration could be differentiated into evaporation and plant
transpiration. Further refinement could be based on the source of the water that
is evapotranspired. Evaporation can occur from open water, bare soil, or
snowpack (sublimation); plants can extract ground water or water from the
unsaturated zone. Such refinements must be balanced with available
measurement techniques, which often are not designed, or lack sufficient
resolution, to distinguish among subcomponents. Most methods for measuring
evapotranspiration, for example, quantify the flux of water from the
land/vegetation surface to the atmosphere and do not distinguish between
different water sources. Fashioning a viable water-budget approach for
estimating evapotranspiration or other water-budget components requires
analysis of available measurement techniques.

Water storage occurs within all three compartments of the hydrologic cycle. The
amount of water stored in the atmosphere is small compared to that on land
surface and in the subsurface. Surface water is stored in rivers, ponds, wetlands,
reservoirs, icepack’s, and snowpack’s. Subsurface storage can be categorized into
various sub accounting units, such as the root zone, the unsaturated zone as a
whole, the saturated zone, or different geologic units. An expanded form, but
certainly not an exhaustive refinement, of the water budget appropriate for many
hydrologic studies can be written as (Scanlon and others, 2002):

P + Qswin + Qgwin = ETsw + ETgw + ETuz + ∆Ssw + ∆Ssnow + ∆Suz + ∆Sgw + Qgwout + RO + Qbf

where the superscripts refer to surface water (sw), ground water (gw),
unsaturated zone (uz); RO is surface runoff; Qgwout refers to both ground-water
flow out of the site and any withdrawal by pumping; and Qbf is base flow
(ground-water discharge to streams). It is unlikely that all elements in above
equation will be of importance at any one site; some will be of negligible
magnitude and can be ignored. Indeed, when selecting an accounting unit for
developing a water budget, judicious selection of boundaries can greatly facilitate
the accounting process. Consider, for example, a small watershed and associated
shallow ground-water system. Watershed boundaries are well defined: there is no
surface flow in, and surface flow out occurs only in a stream channel, where
discharge can be readily measured. If watershed boundaries correspond to
ground-water divides, there is also no subsurface inflow. Suppose all ground
water that is not lost to ET eventually discharges to the stream; an appropriate
water budget for the watershed could be stated as:

P = ET + ∆S+ RO + Qbf

If the annual change in storage is small, evapotranspiration can be estimated as

the difference between precipitation and streamflow out of the watershed.
ANS 2:

Mean 93.91
Standard Error 0.948267426
Median 96
Mode 97
Standard Deviation 9.482674259
Sample Variance 89.92111111
Kurtosis -0.93904984
Skewness -0.295973138

Ogive Curve
100.00%
90.00%
80.00%
70.00%
60.00%
50.00%
40.00%
30.00%
20.00%
10.00%
0.00%
70 75 80 85 90 95 100 105 110
Bin
Ans 3(a):

Log likelihood: -14.719

Parameter Estimate Std. Err.
mu 4.27667 1.74594
In this case, mean= (2.4+4.25+0.77+13.22+3.55+1.3)/6 =4.28 days
So, λ=1/mean==0.234 day-1
ln L= n ln L - λ∑xi
=-14.7
Ans 3(b):
Ans 4:

On plotting the Discharge data on X axis and Stage data on Y axis we get the
following plot:

Discharge vs Stage
30

25

20

15

10

0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000

On fitting polynomial of order 2 we get the following equation:

y = -7.34E-07x2 + 0.00359x + 21.7
and on fitting polynomial of order 3 we get the following equation:
y = 6.34E-10x3 - 2.49E-06x2 + 0.00492x + 21.5

where,
y = Stage,
x = Discharge
so, stage of the river corresponding to a discharge of 2600 m3/s is 26.07216 m
(n=2).
And stage of the river corresponding to a discharge of 2600 m3/s is 28.603 m
(n=3).
Ans 5(a):
By plotting position recurrence interval Tp for each discharge is obtained as
Tp = (N+1)/m = 28/m
Where,
m = order number.
The discharge magnitude Q are plotted against the corresponding T p on a Gumbel
extreme probability paper.
Order Number Flood Discharge Tp
1 7826 28.00
2 6900 14.00
3 6761 9.33
4 6599 7.00
5 5060 5.60
6 5050 4.67
7 4903 4.00
8 4798 3.50
9 4652 3.11
10 4593 2.80
11 4366 2.55
12 4290 2.33
13 4175 2.15
14 4124 2.00
15 3873 1.87
16 3757 1.75
17 3700 1.65
18 3521 1.56
19 3496 1.47
20 3380 1.40
21 3320 1.33
22 2988 1.27
23 2947 1.22
24 2947 1.17
25 2709 1.12
26 2399 1.08
27 1971 1.04
From the above table,
Average discharge = 4263 m3/s
And,
Variance = 1432.6 m3/s

From table of Gamble’s Extreme value Distribution for N = 27:

Yn = 0.5332 and Sn = 1.1004

Choosing T = 10 years

YT = - [ln * ln (10/9)] = 2.25037

K = (2.25307-0.5332)/1.1004 = 1.56

Average xT = 4263 + (1.56 * 1432.6) = 6499 m3/s

Similarly, values of xT are calculated for two more T values as shown below:

T years xT (m3/s)
5.0 5522
10.0 6499
20.0 7436

It is seen that due to the property of the Gumble’s extreme probability paper
these points lie on a straight line. A straight line is drawn through these points. It
is seen that the observed data fit well with the theoretical Gumbel’s extreme
value distribution.

By extrapolation of the theoretical xT vs t relationship,

At T = 100 years, xT = 9600 m3/s

At T = 150 years, xT = 10,700 m3/s
Ans 5(b):
The variate z = log x is first calculated for all the discharges shown in table below.
Then the statistics Z, σ and Cx are calculated from table to obtain

YEAR FLOOD (X) z= log(X)

1951 2947 3.46938
1952 3521 3.546666
1953 2399 3.38003
1954 4124 3.615319
1955 3496 3.543571
1956 2947 3.46938
1957 5060 3.704151
1958 4903 3.690462
1959 3751 3.574147
1960 4798 3.68106
1961 4290 3.632457
1962 4652 3.66764
1963 5050 3.703291
1964 6900 3.838849
1965 4366 3.640084
1966 3380 3.528917
1967 7826 3.89354
1968 3320 3.521138
1969 6599 3.819478
1970 3700 3.568202
1971 4175 3.620656
1972 2988 3.475381
1973 2709 3.432809
1974 3873 3.588047
1975 4593 3.662096
1976 6761 3.830011
1977 1971 3.294687

σz = 0.1427 Cs = (27*0.0030) / (26) (25) (0.1427)3

Z = 3.6071 Cs = 0.043
 The flood discharge for a calculated as below. Here, values of Kz for given t and Cs
= 0.043 are read from Table.

T(years) Kz (for Cs = 0.043) Kz σ z ZT = Z +Kz σz XT = antilog ZT (m3/s)

100 2.358 0.3365 3.9436 8782
200 2.616 0.3733 3.9804 9559
1000 3.152 0.4498 4.0569 11400