Development of a Water Runoff Model for Pakistan: A tool for Identifying and Assessing Micro-hydro Sites

Abstract

A hydrologic model for basins draining through Pakistan is developed with the specific intent of identifying microhydro sites and assessing their quality. The model outputs runoff which is used to estimate flow rate through each geographic cell. These flow rates are scaled by topographic slope using a relationship for potential power to approximate micro-hydro productivity on a cell-by-cell basis. A major hindrance in building and applying models to the region is the lack of dense and consistent meteorological data. This is partially ameliorated by downscaling the data, which improves both its resolution and ability to represent the underlying processes. This study compares the Delta and Bias CorrectionSpatial Disaggregation (BCSD) downscaling methods, ultimately using the meteorological time-series data produced through the Delta method as inputs to the hydrological model. Results are given in normalized form as a demonstration of the model's utility for assessing potential micro-hydro site quality. Future work will include analysis of past and future trends in runoff, where future meteorological scenarios will be based upon the emissions paths developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.