Data Acquisition

The input data depends on few things such as:

Your catchment location. If it is situated in area where there is now snow then you have to make a simple rainfall runoff model popularly known as RR model . If your catchment contains both then you have to make snow runoff + rainfall runoff model. We will go for the snowfall + rainfall runoff model. If you want to make RR model just remove the snow component.

For Snow + rainfall we need temperature and precipitation data. The snow runoff will be a function of the temperature. I will not go into the equation details as these comes with all the models.

We use GFS(Global Forecasting system) grids as our temperature source as we do not have any real time temperature source. The temperature grid looks something like this.

Now we have temperature grinds. For precipitation we can use TRMM/GPM for real time data and GFS/ECMWF for forecasted data. The GFS forecasted grid data is shown below:

Similarly we can download ECMWF , TRMM data from respective ftp servers.  The data downloaded is in different file formats such as HDF, NetCDF, grib, grib2, bin, tif etc.

For gage data of rainfall and temperature we use .csv files. You can have xls files, space delimited or any other format with which you are comfortable with.

In next chapter I will give you glimpse of data processing and converting it so that it could be given as an input to the model