A Catchment Scale Assessment of Water Balance Components: A Case Study of Chittar Catchment in South India
Abstract Analyzing the Water Balance Components (WBCs) of catchment help in assessing the water resources for their sustainable management and development. This paper used Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model mainly to analyze the variation in the WBCs through the change in the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) and meteorological variables. For this purpose, the model used the inputs of LULC and meteorological variables between the year 2001-2020 at five year and daily time interval respectively from the Chittar river catchment. The developed models were evaluated using SWAT-CUP split-up procedure (pre-calibration and post-calibration). The model was found to be good in calibration and validation, yielding the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.94 and 0.81 respectively. Furthermore, WBCs of the catchment were estimated for the near future (2021 - 2030) at monthly and annual scale. For this endeavour, LULC was forecasted for the year 2021 and 2026 using Celluar Automata (CA)-ANN and for the same period meteorological variables were also forecasted using the smoothing moving average method from the historical data.