Application of Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) Model in Analyzing Nitrogen Transport Inside the Narmada River Basin

The Narmada River is one of the largest rivers in Western India encompassing a watershed area of 92,672 km2. It is one of the most important rivers for water needs of the state of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Madhya Pradesh. The climate of the basin is humid and tropical but region surrounding this river watershed is predominantly dry and resembles semi-arid conditions. The population inside the states covering this watershed increased by an average of 23% from 1991 to 2011 causing multitude of water scarcity and water quality deterioration issues. These problems were caused by increase in sewage waste and untreated industrial discharge dumped into the river stream along with chemical fertilizers washing off from the farmlands flowing into the river. While there are several studies that model the watershed hydrology and water balance components, there has been no study that analyses the transport of nutrients inside the watershed. This study aims at using a semi-distributed hydrological model—Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) to model the nitrogen (NO2 + NO3) transport and distribution inside the basin for 2001–2019. Nutrients and discharge data from Central Water Commission (CWC) of India were used to build this model along with other required input forcing obtained through remotely sensed datasets. We found that the subbasins near boundary of the Narmada watershed are experiencing significant increase in nitrogen concentrations at an estimated rate of 0.0001–0.002 mg/L/yr. The potential reason for such increase is high rate of conversion of forested land to agricultural land causing usage of fertilizers that are rich in nitrogen.