Decision-making based on projected scenarios is becoming indispensable in modern complex world. A substantial effort is made at developing modeling systems that are affordable, available and address pressing needs related to water related environment management. Three systems, flood modeling, rainfall downscaling and urban drainage design have been developed to be used by practitioners and researchers in the region.

Flood Modelling System

A comprehensive 3 dimensional physically based distributed hydrological model has been developed and tested over the last 15 years. The model can be used for inundation modeling, river over-flow, and flood forecasting . Coupled with this model, a risk assessment module has been developed which estimates potential economic loss from a predicted / forecasted flood. The estimates are based on the loss functions for the given landuse and expected water level. It has been verified in Japan and applied in Thailand and Viet Nam.

Rainfall forecasting Through Downscaling

We have developed a low cost system for rainfall forecasting completely based on open source software. The system first download global weather forecasts over the intenet. Then using the Local Area Model, DRF, it downscale and forecast rainfall for the region of interest. The system has been tested for over 1 year in Mekong Basin, Sri Lanka and Bhutan and was found to yield continuous un-interuppted forecasts. Typically downscaling is done over three regions to reach spatial resolutions of about 5 km.

Managing Urban Water Cycle

Urban hydrological cycle gets altered due to changes to water cycle brought about by urbanization process. This involves increase of direct runoff, shortening of concentration time, decrease of ground water and changes to unsaturated zond soil properties. This disruption can be minimized through artificial recharge and temporary retention. The urban drainage system provide a host of tools to estimate the changes to hydrology and its recovery by deploying
infiltration and retention systems.