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Exploring relationships between drought characteristics and environmental flow conditions in Indian catchments

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Abstract

Environmental flow plays a crucial role in the sustainability of rivers and aquatic ecosystems. Reduction in the flow of rivers degrades its ecosystem functions and health, resulting in severe impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Additionally, meteorological drought, which occurs due to a substantial reduction in normal rainfall, subsequently affects the river flow. To understand such consequences, long-term observed flow data are required, which is not readily available for geographically different catchments. The present study is an effort to explore the relationship between the drought characteristics based on percent rainfall departure (%RD) and average annual flow (%AAF) based environmental flow conditions. Drought characteristics and the environmental flow conditions have been assessed for 17 Indian catchments from 5 different river basins of India, namely Godavari, Mahanadi, Tapi, Brahmani-Baitarini and Mahi. Relationship analysis showed a coefficient of determination (R2) value of more than 0.55 for 11 out of 17 catchments, showing satisfactory results. Furthermore, the analysis represents that %AAF and %RD are positively correlated. The explored relationships can be useful for assessing environmental flow conditions in Indian catchments without discharge data. Also, the study approach is extendable to understanding drought linkage to environmental flow conditions for the ungauged catchments with rainfall departure records only.

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Data availability

Data used in the study are obtained from IndiaWris website.

Abbreviations

EAC:

Expert Appraisal Committee

EF:

Environmental flow

EIA:

Environmental impact assessment

AAF:

Average annual flow

%AAF:

Percentage of average annual flow

CWC:

Central Water Commission

GoI:

Government of India

ISRO:

Indian Space Research Organisation

MoEF:

Ministry of Environment and Forest

SPI:

Standardized Precipitation Index

%RD:

Percent rainfall departure

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the support from the India Meteorological Department and India WRIS for providing data used in the study. The authors are also grateful to Director, CSIRNEERI, for support and motivation during the study. The manuscript has KRC No.: CSIR-NEERI/KRC/2022/DEC/ERMD-MZC/1.

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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received to carry out this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Energy and Resource Management Division, CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Nagpur, 440020, India

    Kumar Amrit

  2. Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), Ghaziabad, 201002, India

    Kumar Amrit & Arti Roshan Soni

  3. Mumbai Zonal Center, CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Mumbai, 400018, India

    Arti Roshan Soni

  4. Texas A&M AgriLife Research Center, Texas A&M University, El Paso, TX, 79927, USA

    Santosh S. Palmate

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  1. Kumar Amrit
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Kumar Amrit wrote the main manuscript. Arti Roshan Soni and Santosh Palmate prepared figures and were involved in the conceptualization. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Amrit, K., Soni, A.R. & Palmate, S.S. Exploring relationships between drought characteristics and environmental flow conditions in Indian catchments. Environ Earth Sci 83, 190 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-024-11486-5

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