Research Projects

Reservoir sedimentation is the major problem, due to it every year the reservoir capacity is lost to considerable amount. This loss in capacity also instigates hydrological extremes viz. flood and/or drought in the downstream area. Surveying for assessment of the reservoir by conventional approach is time and money consuming. Geospatial technology provides ample opportunity in this field through the availability of high resolution satellite data from the sensors (active/passive) on board Satellites. Till date mostly optical data is used to calculate the water spread area of the reservoir. However, due to presence of cloud in most of the optical data during onset of monsoon, the water spread at the lowest reservoir level could not be mapped. In turn the revised capacity or sedimentation is generally assessed between either below full reservoir level (FRL) or above maximum draw down level (MDDL). Nowadays, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data at reasonable spatial resolution is available freely in public domain. Moreover, microwave data has capability to penetrate cloud and the information below cloud can easily be retrieved. To overcome the issues related to optical data, in the present study, the reservoir sedimentation can also be estimated using SAR data. Once the capacity of the reservoir is estimated, the study can be extended to analyse the flood risk downstream of reservoir using suitable hydrodynamic modelling incorporating space based inputs.