Effectiveness of Drainage Morphmetric Analysis for Water Resource Management in Changing Climate Scenarios

The present work represented an integrated methodology for the assessment of drainage morphometric components of Kali river basin for water resource management using satellite data and field survey. Various linear, aerial and relief aspects of the Kali basin were evaluated and their relationships are analyzed which provides the valuable hydrological and hydrogeological data base for understanding of topographical aspects and complexity of the basin and their inter-relationships for management of water resources at river basin level. The study revealed that the basin possesses a fourth order stream and the length of stream segment is maximum for first order stream and decreases as the stream order increases. The drainage density (Dd) of basin is observed 0.41 km/km2, which indicates that the area possesses highly permeable soils and low relief. The mean bifurcation ratio of the Kali river basin is 4.38 which indicate that the basin is not much influenced by geological structures. The basin also have lower form factor (0.22), representing elongated shape and signifying a flat hydrograph peak for longer time period. Low value of length of overland flow (1.22) indicates steep slopes and shorter flow paths. The present work shows that basin slope, drainage density (D), length of overland flow (Lo) and basin relief (H) are closely connected and expressively related with a large number of morphometric variables. The results observed from the morphometric analysis of drainage basin provide the very informative hydrological information for water resource management program of the basin and flood management.