SR-10 : Identification of formats of collection of data for drought studies

Abstract

Basic hydro-meteorological data are essential for planning and management of water resources projects and therefore are collected over the years with enormous effort and expenditure. For the analysis of drought, those data which are conventionally stored in registers and files without a proper inventory are needed. Often very little effort is put in for their documentation in a scientific manner, resulting in loss/damage to the data, their limited use, and non-availability in time. Besides, data in unprocessed form is of limited use. Hence processed data in the desired form, known as informations are of real importance to the end user.

In this report data required for the drought analysis are discussed. The definitions of drought, problem of drought in India, and type of drought are also discussed. The planning of station network as well as ways of collection of data, their handling and presentation are discussed in brief. Application of computer in data storage and retrieval system proves to be very much helpful in present context. Format of data collection for computer storage adopted by various agencies are given. Besides, the available formats of collection of different data, used by different state/central agencies were collected their drawbacks are discussed and the modified format for each type of data collection are also suggested. The existing formats for data collection are presented in Appendix I., II, III & IV for different parameters and the modified formats for all these parameters are presented in Appendix V.