Predictability of Western Himalayan river flow: melt seasonal inflow into Bhakra Reservoir in northern India

Abstract

Abstract. Snowmelt-dominated streamflow of the Western Himalayan rivers is an important water resource during the dry pre-monsoon spring months to meet the irrigation and hydropower needs in northern India. Here we study the seasonal prediction of melt-dominated total inflow into the Bhakra Dam in northern India based on statistical relationships with meteorological variables during the preceding winter. Total inflow into the Bhakra Dam includes the Satluj River flow together with a flow diversion from its tributary, the Beas River. Both are tributaries of the Indus River that originate from the Western Himalayas, which is an understudied region. Average measured winter snow volume at the upper-elevation stations and corresponding lower-elevation rainfall and temperature of the Satluj River basin were considered as empirical predictors. Akaike information criteria (AIC) and Bayesian information criteria (BIC) were used to select the best subset of inputs from all the possible combinations of predictors for a multiple linear regression framework. To test for potential issues arising due to multicollinearity of the predictor variables, cross-validated prediction skills of the best subset were also compared with the prediction skills of principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares regression (PLSR) techniques, which yielded broadly similar results. As a whole, the forecasts of the melt season at the end of winter and as the melt season commences were shown to have potential skill for guiding the development of stochastic optimization models to manage the trade-off between irrigation and hydropower releases versus flood control during the annual fill cycle of the Bhakra Reservoir, a major energy and irrigation source in the region.

Hydrological drought types in cold climates: quantitative analysis of causing factors and qualitative survey of impacts

“…Almost all summer droughts in this area are probably rainfall deficit droughts. Spring discharge in the western Himalayas is mainly explained by winter precipitation (Pal et al, 2013), so snowmelt droughts in western Himalaya might have similar causing factors as snowmelt droughts in Norway. Snowmelt contributions to discharge differ, however, widely over the Himalayas: from up to 50 % in the far western catchments, 25 % in far eastern catchments, and less than 20 % elsewhere (Bookhagen and Burbank, 2010).…”

Implications of climate change for water resources development in the Ganges basin

“…Summer rain and snowfall at high elevation in the eastern catchments of the Ganges therefore contributes much more to total basin runoff than glacier melt does, outside the more heavily glaciated sub-basins in the western Ganges (Rees & Collins, 2006). This precipitation gradient implies that changes in glacier melt will have more limited impacts in the Ganges than in the Indus basin on the western side of the Himalaya, though effects on the seasonality of snowmelt are harder to predict Alford et al, 2011;Pal et al, 2011).…”

Multi-step ahead daily inflow forecasting using ERA-Interim reanalysis dataset based on gradient boosting regression trees

“…Thus, it is very difficult to select appropriate features for inflow forecasting. Current feature selection methods for inflow forecasting mainly include the correlation coefficient method (Badrzadeh et al, 2013;Siqueira et al, 2018;Pal et al, 2013), the stepwise selection method (Wei, 2016), and the Gamma test method (Chang and Tsai, 2016), etc. These methods have limited 65 ability for capturing nonlinear relationships or tend to need much more computation resource.…”