Development of a rationalized hydrometeorological network for an urban
catchment under resource-constrained scenario
Abstract
An accurate assessment of hydrometeorological variables/ observations
over an urban area is crucial to policy-makers and civic bodies to
address an extensive range of water resources and environmental problems
for informed decision-making related to the water distribution system
and drainage networks. This necessitates the establishment of
hydrometeorological monitoring networks that can efficiently obtain
consistent and reliable information about the spatiotemporal variability
of multiple hydrometeorological observations while being economically
sustainable. However, the urban catchments especially in underdeveloped
and developing countries are often subjected to spatial, environmental
as well as monetary limitations which hinders the application of
conventional approaches followed to set up the hydrometeorological
networks. With this context, we propose a novel rationalization
framework to record numerous hydrometeorological variables and acquire
maximum information at an optimal cost. We have attempted to combine a
multivariate statistical technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
with a multi-attribute decision-making method, Technique for Order of
Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions (TOPSIS) to rank the
significant hydrometeorological stations of an existing Automatic
Weather Stations (AWS) network. It is observed that the set of
rationalized AWS network obtained from this framework can capture the
spatiotemporal information of the hydrometeorological variables
considered in this study as efficiently as the entire AWS network.
Additionally, the comparison of flood inundation and hazard maps derived
from a 3-way coupled hydrodynamic flood modeling framework for the
rationalized and original network also reflects its credibility to
capture the flooding characteristics for the catchment. This proposed
framework has been applied over Mumbai city, India, a major flood-prone
area, and is characterized by high spatiotemporal variability of
hydro-meteorological observations and space constraints due to dense
population. This framework is generic and can be employed to reevaluate
the prevailing hydro-meteorological networks in other catchments and
help in the reduction of the maintenance cost while efficiently
capturing the variability of observations.