A comparison of hydrological data obtained by means of SIATL, BANDAS and SIG applications

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Irving Acencio, Ramon Dominiguez, Maritza Arganis, Martin Jimenez, Eliseo Carrizosa

Thursday 2 july 2015

12:30 - 12:33h at Central America (level 0)

Themes: (T) Water resources and hydro informatics (WRHI), (ST) Catchment hydrology, Poster pitches

Parallel session: Poster pitches: 11H. WRHI - Catchment

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Mexico has several committees and public agencies in charge of the management about hydrological information for planning public and private projects. Those institutions give the user free software for extracting data such as inflows, drainage basin or slopes of a watershed. In this paper data given by two applications, the Surface Water Data National Repository (BANDAS, CONAGUA-IMTA) and the Basin Water Flow Simulator (SIATL- INEGI) were compared against data obtained by means of a geographical information system (GIS). Difference mainly in the drained area were detected. For this comparison 24 gauged basins unaffected by dams located upstream were selected. For each one, the drainage basin, the mean slope and the design inflow were obtained. In some of these basins huge differences between the two applications and the GIS were found. A special emphasis in analyzing the SIATL version 2.2 was done, because this software is given as an application which allow the users to analyze and consult hydrological information, based on hydrographic network generated in a 1:50000 scale. When searching the gages in the SIATL, it was found 14 of the 24 basins don’t exist on its information repository; from these 14, 4 had only one near climatologic station. Only 4 of 24 had the same coordinates given by the BANDAS application. In 2 of these 24 gages a rare drainage basin was generated; there were found zones where the river has one ascending direction that physically is not possible and zones where the SIATL didn’t consider small areas for the final calculation without any apparently reason. For the drainage basin the values had important variations with all software, for example there were found differences from 6 to 120900 km2 when BANDAS and SIATL were compared and from 3 to 46596 km2 between BANDAS and SIG software. In a final analysis it was found the SIG generates the nearest values to BANDAS in 22 of 24 cases. All these results are very interesting because of the differences given by these kind of software of public agencies in the drainage basin which represents an important hydrological variable for any hydraulic work project.