VOL. 4, NO. 3, MAY 2009 ISSN 1819-6608
ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences
© 2006-2009 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved.
www.arpnjournals.com
ANALYSIS OF FLOW PATTERN BETWEEN HILL AND LAKE
Devatha Chella
1
and Arun Kumar Thalla
2
1
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India
2
Department of Environmental Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India
E-Mail: revacp@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The demand for water is increasing rapidly with the increased population, industries and irrigation which lead to
the scarcity of water. In order to avoid such a scarcity, which will hamper the development of the country, water resources
projects should be planned and managed effectively. The south part of the Chennai metropolitan in India consists of hills
and lakes. Due to the rapid urbanization, all the lakes in this zone are being encroached thus hindering the contribution of
lake for ground water resulting in the depletion of ground water. For this enhancing situation, a microlevel study has been
carried out on the surface water estimation and analysis of sub-surface flow pattern. This paper mainly emphasize on
ground water modeling using VISUAL MODFLOW. Groundwater flow models are used to calculate the rate and direction
of movement of groundwater through aquifers. Estimation of surface runoff using Soil Conservation Service (SCS) shows
that only in the year 2004, there is a high runoff which leads to over flow from the lakes and for the other years (2001-
2003) average runoff contribution to the lakes is from 17% to 45%. The ground water analysis was done for six years
(2001 to 2006) and the results indicate that for the monsoon period the velocity ranges from 0.02 to 0.05m/sec and for the
non-monsoon period it ranges from 3.21*10
-2
m/sec to 8.75*10
-2
m/sec. which implies that there is a rapid increase in the
radius of influence due to urbanization.
Keywords: model, ground water, flow pattern, modflow.
INTRODUCTION
The demand for water is increasing with the
population, industries and irrigation leads to scarcity of
water. In order to avoid such a scarcity it is important to
improve the efficiency of the planning and management of
water resources. Depletion of groundwater in areas where
excessive withdrawals have occurred emphasizes the need
for the analysis of the flow conditions.
Just below the hill side groundwater mainly
occurs in the unconsolidated weathered mantle, underlying
fractures, fissures, joints etc. and are termed as hard rock
regions. The weathered mantle is usually poorly
permeable but has water storage capacity. The fractured
zones have high transmissibility values depending on the
course, upon the apertures and the interconnections of the
fractures. Generally fractures are interconnected with
weathered zone as a result groundwater in the weathered
mantle may recharge the fractures. This shallow
groundwater zone ends in a lake. Kirby (1988) defined the
process of movement of water on the hill slope and its
contribution to ground water as Hill slope Hydrology and
classified the flow pattern in the hilly slopes as Hortonian
overland flow, saturation overland flow and return flow.
At any point on or below ground in a hilly terrain, water
shall be moving under a combination of potential gradients
viz by gravity and water pressure or tension. For a hill
slope with uniform net rainfall, flow vectors are typically
vertical through the soil. However, vertical flows are
critical in a hill slope hydrology as they control the
diversion of flow on the slopes that finally results in lateral
flow. Reddi (1990) relates the fluctuation of the ground
water on a hilly terrain as a function of rainfall intensity,
evapotranspiration, flow in the unsaturated zone and
drainage by gravity. Further, he developed a mathematical
model for assessing the ground water level on hillside
slopes by using two-dimensional finite differences
method. Gupta and Singh (1985, 1988) did a comparative
study between finite difference and mass balance model
associated with partially penetrating well in a hard rock
terrain for the simulation of flow regime and they
concluded that Finite difference gives better results than a
mass balance model.
Kacimov (2000) describes the behavior of the
lake, mainly its regime from gaining to losing, or flow
through, as a function of the varying incident groundwater
flow velocity, evaporation, precipitation runoff rates in the
lakes and their hydrological characteristics. Yang et al
(2002) proposed a flow-interval hill slope discretization
scheme for catchment hydrological modeling. By this
scheme, a two-dimensional catchment is simplified into a
one-dimensional cascade of flow intervals linked by the
main stream. This model performed well on simulating the
overall water balance, general flow pattern, and daily and
hourly hydrographs of a whole catchment, as well as
simultaneous simulation in different sub catchments.
Though many researchers have studied the surface and
ground water balances, there has been limited study on the
complex interaction of surface and ground water mass
balances on a hilly slope.
Generally more than 95% of water in the stream
flow passes to into the ground before reaching the channel
network. The fluctuation of groundwater levels depends
upon many related process such as rainfall,
evapotranspiration, flow in the unsaturated zone and
drainage by gravity.
With this as back ground, this paper mainly aims
in (i) estimation of surface runoff of the study area using
Soil Conservation Service (SCS) method (ii) analysis of
64