Abstract:
Hydrology is an applied natural science and therefore hydrologist5 have to deal with vast amount of data. Moreover, with the increase in population and industrial activities, water is gradually becoming a scarce commodity rather than a freely available natural resource. Due to this, the analysis of water resources systems is becoming more and more complicated and detailed and this demands, inter alia, more frequent observation of larger number of variables (1). It has been estimated that the annual volume of primary information received from a single gauging station is Li the neighbourhood of 150,000 characters. Other observations such as water quality might produce between 300 to 600,000 characters. The summarization of these data in a water year book is a time consuming and voluminous job. Moreover, several types of statistical information is required for the analysis, of hydrological systems, i.e. flood frequency determination, design flood estimation, low flow analysis and reservoir operations (8). The proper storage of these data in conventional way is next to impossible because of sheer volume of labour involved.
