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GIS and Visualisation Capabilities for Interlinking of Indian Rivers
 Dr. M. Krishnaveni Visiting Faculty mveni70@yahoo.co.in J. Prakashvel MS Scholar pra_vel@yahoo.com Dr. M. Kaarmegam Director karmegam@annauniv.edu Centre for Water Resources, Anna University, Chennai – 600 025 Tamil Nadu, India Ph/Fax: 2235 1075 Abstract Uneven rainfall distribution in time and space is the main cause for hydrologic extremes such as drought and flood. When one part of the country is reeling under severe water scarcity, another part is damaged by floods. Some rivers are perennially dry and some rivers discharge huge quantum of water to the sea every year. This necessitates the massive task of Interlinking of rivers by which such surplus and deficits could be redistributed for the betterment of the whole country. It involves multidisciplinary data on various aspects such as hydrological, environmental, agricultural, socioeconomical and political. For decision making on such complicated project issues, the related data and information should be stored at one place in digital form for easy retrieval, updation and analysis for effective planning and execution purposes. At this age of electronic era, it is appropriate to use computer system along with powerful spatial visualisation and analysis tools such as Geographical Information System(GIS) to simulate the entire project system over the desktop. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the ways in which GIS and Visualisation(VRML) can be effectively used to support decision making for interlinking of rivers. As far as Interlinking of rivers is concerned, it involves with point features such as observation stations and cross drainage works, line features such as river and canal and areas such as land use and forest. Only GIS can model the geographical location and their connectivity of these features. As this project of interlinking involve huge dissemination of spatial data, creation of spatial database is inevitable. For any water resources project, it is worthwhile to study the hydrological conditions such as rainfall variation, ground water level variation, Landuse of the region, drought prone areas, flood prone areas and other such kind of themes of the region. These thematic layers can be converted into digital form using GIS in the desktop. Various alternate scenarios can be viewed at the desktop. Data from various sources such as toposheets, remote sensing imagery, aerial photograph, paper maps, surveying data can be handled by GIS at one place. |