Abstract:
Land and water resources are the greatest assets of our country and only by their proper utilisation we can banish poverty and raise the standards of living of millions of our people particularly in rural areas. Before independence, the hydrological analyses in our country were carried out mainly on the basis of thumb rules and empirical formulae. The empirical methods were generally used for planning and design. The operation of water resources projects used to be governed by rigid operating rules resulting in many practical problems. The major hurdle in the use of rational techniques was the non-availability of sufficient hydrological, hydro-meteorological and other related data and also the absence of good computational facilities. With the availability of more and more observed data and access to relatively much better computational facilities, considerable research and developmental activities have taken place in the area of hydrology and water widely used.
The advent of high speed digital computers and their wide applications have helped the hydrologists to develop more refined methodologies for solution of various hydrological problems. The GIS packages have been developed for processing storing and retrieving the Geographical Information such as topographical features, .soil characteristics, land use details etc. which are very frequently needed for hydrological modelling. This paper describes the current status of the methodologies being adopted for solving the various problems and emerging trends in different areas of surface water hydrology.
