A document by Samba Siva Sai Prasad Thota. Click on the document to view its contents.

The urban population has been on the rise, and as per the European Union Joint Research Commission, by the year 2015, 75% of the total population will be in the cities. Urban imports, exports and infrastructure have a vital role in the local economy, consequently in both national and global economies as well. Water is a key element of all the constituents of an urban agglomeration, and it is a known fact that the constituents utilize water not only from the immediate neighborhood but from elsewhere. Thus, most likely, water footprint of an urban agglomeration extends beyond regional, national and international borders. Methods to estimate water footprint and using the information in the policy context are underway. Data availability and its access at different resolutions impose its own challenges. In this presentation, we present a consumer-centric based approach to understand the nexus of water-energy-food of urban agglomeration and benchmarking nexus elements. The consumer-centric approach helps to assess elements of nexus at the smallest unit level of urban cities, i.e. at the consumer level. The estimated information assists in policy-making as well as in bringing the social awareness for the e¨cient use of resources and sustained development of urban agglomeration. This assessment is adjuvant to urban governments to know their dependence on external water resources and it plays a crucial role in smart cities development.

Increased space-time resolution of hydrologic information in combination with better understanding of hydrologic processes allowed evolution of rainfall-runoff modeling from lumped mode to distributed mode. Relatively, lumped modeling is simple, less data intensive and use less computing resources; typically, semi-distributed modeling falls between lumped- and distributed modeling on a scale of various parameters including modeling complexity, data and computing resources. To understand the influence modeling complexity and hydrologic information on performance of hydrologic models in monsoon driven river basins, we performed a hydrological study on Sabari River Basin, from a tributary of Godavari river basin, delineated at three different spatial scales. Then, The Hydrologic Engineering Center- Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS) model driven in both event- and continuous modes in lumped and semi-distributed modes. The model calibrated and then validated using various verification metrics. Analysis of verification metrics provided insights on different aspects of flood forecasting