Search

The purpose of hydrologic modeling of a watershed is to gain valuable information about the processes occurring within watershed. With increasing temperature of the earth atmosphere, the snow fed mountainous river basins are going to get impacted severely. Lack of adequate weather station limits the scope of researches in these mountainous basins which are critical source of water resource for the country. However, improvement of satellite-based weather products has been able to nullify this barrier to great extent. In this study, a semi distributed hydrologic model of Upper Alaknanda river basin has been developed using gridded meteorological input data sourced from India Meteorological Department (IMD), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Power, and The SWAT (Soil and water Assessment Tool) model. The calibration and validation of the model reflected satisfactory performance with the validation period (2013-2017) showing better match between simulated and observed flow than calibration period (2005-2012). The values of Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, coefficient of determination, and Percent of bias for calibration period are 0.65, 0.67, and 14% respectively. Adoption of semi distributed approach for modeling enables to analyze the basin while preserving the heterogeneous nature of the basin. The spatiotemporal evaluation of snowmelt reveals that highest snowmelt was generated during month of April which also causes highest snowmelt contribution to runoff for April (59.76 %). The outcomes of this study reveals that satellite-based meteorological product can be adopted satisfactorily with SWAT model for estimation of snowmelt in upper Himalayan regions which gives a new direction of research in SWAT diaspora., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)

A proper understanding of soil parameters under different production systems of the world is necessary for efficient soil management. We, therefore, carried out the present study to assess the status of some selected soil properties (soil pH and electrical conductivity (EC)), phyto-available nutrients (available nitrogen (AN), available potassium (AK), exchangeable calcium (Ex. Ca), exchangeable magnesium (Ex. Mg), available sulfur (AS), and soil organic carbon (SOC) pools (SOC, total organic carbon (TOC), very labile C, labile C, less labile C, and non-labile C) and to establish relationships among the measured soil parameters at different depths of Vertisols of India under various land uses. A total of 150 composite soil samples (from 25 plots including nine from agricultural land, nine from horticultural land, three from forest land, and four from grassland) were collected from 6 soil depths viz, 0-10, 10-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80, and 80-100 cm under agriculture, horticulture, forest, and grassland land uses present in Central India and analyzed. The values of soil pH, EC, AN, AK, Ex. Ca, Ex. Mg, and AS in various soil depths under different land uses varied widely. The values of SOC (0.19 to 1.00%), TOC (0.58 to 2.42%), very labile C (0.14 to 0.83%), labile C (0.05 to 0.25%), less labile C (0.05 to 0.26%) and non-labile C (0.23 to 1.42%) in various soil depths under different land uses also varied significantly. Forest and grassland land uses had higher levels of SOC, TOC, very labile, and non-labile C content in all the soil depths in comparison to SOC, TOC, very labile, and non-labile C content in different soil depths under agriculture and horticulture land use. The levels of SOC, TOC, very labile, and non-labile C content under all the land uses decreased with increasing soil depths. SOC was positively and significantly correlated with AN, AK, AS, and estimated SOC pools in surface soil layers. Principal component analysis (PCA) of soil parameters in different soil depths resulted in 5 principal components (PCs) with > 1 eigenvalue and accounting for > 75% variability. This information could be used for managing SOC status and phyto-available nutrients in Vertisols under different land uses., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.)