An Integrated Approach to Hydrographic Surveying of Large Reservoirs—Application to Tarbela Reservoir in Pakistan

Sarfraz Munir¹, Muhammad Armaghan², Arsalan Babrus³

¹Water Resources Engineering Program, University of Kurdistan Hewler, Kurdistan Region, Iraq.
²MM Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd., Lahore, Pakistan.
³Water and Power Development Authority, Tarbela Dam Project, Haripur, Pakistan.

DOI: 10.4236/ojmh.2014.44015                

Abstract

Hydrographic surveying in reservoirs is a key activity in order to collect data for a variety of purposes like estimation of storage capacity, rate and pattern of sediment deposition, movement of underwater sediment delta and reservoir routing, etc. These parameters play a pivotal role in any planning, management and operation activity of the reservoirs. Traditional approaches to perform hydrographic surveying in Indus Basin are time consuming, laborious, comparatively inaccurate and costly. As water resources are under immense pressure due to a variety of factors, such inefficient methods are not acceptable for efficient water management. In this study, an integrated approach for hydrographic surveying is introduced and evaluated in terms of its efficiency in comparison with the traditional methods of hydrographic surveying. The approach develops an integrated environment of hydrographic surveying comprising human, hardware and software. The process of surveying starts from in-house planning using specialized geo-spatial softwares. Then, on site a combination of computer hardware, echosounder, differential global positioning system (DGPS), survey vessel and survey crew is made. Post-processing is performed after conducting a survey in order to improve quality of data by filtering errors and producing the end product like reservoir underwater terrain, development of reservoir stage-area and stage-storage relationships, etc. The study was applied to Tarbela Reservoir, Pakistan.

Keywords

Hydrographic Survey, Bathymetric Survey, Tarbela Reservoir, Reservoir Capacity, Differential GPS, Echosounder

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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