A brief report on NHP sponsored Five-days online training course on Hydrological modeling uising SWAT (November 30 – December 04, 2020 at NIH, Roorkee)

Abstract

Water is a vital natural resource. For planning, designing, execution and management of water resources efficiently, the hydrological modelling is an essential aspect of any development project. This training course is designed to impart and transfer the working knowledge of using a semi-distributed hydrological model called SWAT. SWAT, a river basin or watershed scale model, is a physically-based, spatially distributed, continuous model that operates on a daily time step. It is a product of four decades of modelling efforts by USDA-ARS, USDA-NRCS and Texas A&M University. It was developed to predict the impact of land management practices on water, sediment and agricultural chemical yields in large complex watersheds with varying soils, land use and management conditions over long periods. It can incorporate the effects of tanks and the reservoirs/check dams off-stream as well as on-stream. The major advantage of SWAT is that it does not require much calibration. It, therefore, can be used on ungauged watersheds, can predict relative impacts of alternative scenarios such as changes in management practices, climate and vegetation on water quality and quantity. Model output includes all water balance components at the level of each watershed and is available at daily, monthly or annual time steps. SWAT model has been extensively used to address water resources and nonpoint-source pollution problems for a range of scales and environmental conditions across the globe. SWAT typically uses the ArcSWAT interface to create its inputs that work in the licensed ArcGIS environment. The Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a free and open-source GIS that performs most GIS functions as in commercial GIS. Given its robustness and wide use in academic and professional environments, the present training course conducted using QSWAT, a QGIS interface for SWAT model.