ESTIMATION OF SNOW MELT RUNOFF FOR BEAS CATCHMENT WITH LIMITED DATA

Abstract

The water of river Beas has been utilized for operation of different water resources projects, like Beas-.Sutlej link project etc. Thus the through hydrological investigation is essential, for better decisions, in planning, design and opera-tion of water resources projects for optimum development. This river is receiving the significant mount of its water through the melting of snow deposited on the high moun-tainous o$ Beas Oatchment through eight months of critical flow period (i.e. March - October). In this study a snow hydrologic model has been estab-lished incorporate with limited available hydrological data such as daily temperature, daily rainfall for limited rain gauge stations, permanent snow cover area, and daily gauged discharge of Beas river. The model has been calibrated for the period of March and April (rainless period) using three years data (i•e. 1972, 1973 and 1974). further certain adjustment has been made in Model coefficients, to make it sufficiently fair for predicting snow melt runoff for remaining flow Saw period. Later the model was tested by the Beas river flow discharge. The computed snow melt hydrograph has been compared with gauged discharge hydro-graph, ard found to be in close agreement especially for the period of snow melt season. This established model can be used to generate day to day snow melt runoff, utilizing degree-day-temperature and rainfall data snow cover are a. In this study the water shed coefficients K. and K computed for snowmel t model with range 0.05 to 0.055 for different melt period and 0.0007 respectively