Prevailing Weather Conditions During Summer Seasons Around Gangotri Glacier

Meteorological data collected near the snout of the Gangotri Glacier suggest that the study area receives less rainfall. The average seasonal rainfall is observed to be about 260 mm. The rainfall distribution does not show any monsoon impact. Amount of seasonal rainfall is highly variable (131.4-368.8 mm) from year to year, but, in general, August had the maximum rainfall. A verage daily maximum and minimum temperatures were 14.7 and 4.1°C respectively, whereas average mean temperature was 9.4°C. July was recorded as the warmest month. During daytime, wind speed was four times higher than that at night-time. The average daytime and night-time winds were 12.6 and 3.0 km/h respectively. Mean seasonal evaporation was 640.8 mm, which is high with respect to the high altitude. Average relative humidity and daily sunshine duration were also high throughout the melting season

HYDROLOGICAL PROCESSES SCIENTIFIC BRIEFING Improving peak flow estimates in artificial neural network river flow models

Abstract In this paper, the concern of accuracy in peak estimation by the artificial neural network (ANN) river flow models is discussed and a suitable statistical procedure to get better estimates from these models is presented. The possible cause for underestimation of peak flow values has been attributed to the local variations in the function being mapped due to varying skewness in the data series, and theoretical considerations of the network functioning confirm this. It is envisaged that an appropriate data transformation will reduce the local variations in the function being mapped, and thus any ANN model built on the transformed series should perform better. This heuristic is illustrated and confirmed by many case studies and the results suggest that the model performance is significantly improved by data transformation. The model built on transformed data outperforms the model built on raw data in terms of various statistical performance indices. The peak estimates are improved significantly by data transformation

Diurnal Variations in Discharge and Suspended Sediment Concentration, Including Runoff-Delaying Characteristics, of the Gangotri Glacier in the Garhwal Himalayas

Diurnal variations in discharge and suspended sediment concentration (SSC), including runoff delaying characteristics, have been studied for the Gangotri Glacier, the largest glacier in the Garhwal Himalayas (glacierized area 286 km2; drainage area 556 km2). Hourly discharge and SSC data were collected near the snout of the glacier (∼4000 m) at an interval of about 15 days for an entire ablation period (May–October 2001). Diurnal variability in SSC was found to be much higher than the discharge. Hysteresis trends between discharge and SSC were established. Results indicate that, for the study glacier, clockwise hysteresis dominated for the entire melt season, indicating that most of the time the SSC led the discharge. During the peak melt period, anticlockwise hysteresis was also observed for a few hours. Assessment of runoff-delaying characteristics was made by estimating the time lag between the occurrence of melting and its appearance as runoff along with estimation of time to peak. A comparison of runoff-delaying parameters with discharge ratio clearly indicated that changes in time lag and time to peak are inversely correlated with variations in discharge. Attempts have also been made to establish the relationship between discharge and SSC using short-interval data