Determining reservoir water volume of ponds in Hatay province using GIS

Planning and projecting water storage structures such as dams and ponds in a appropriate and quickly requires intensive labor, knowledge and experience. The amount of water that these structures can store is a parameter that should be known in advance for planning and feasibility studies. Estimating the reservoir volume of water using a digital elevation model that is already available using geographic information systems will not only accelerate the feasibility studies, but also reducing time loss and labor. In this study, it was investigated that how accurately the reservoir volume can be estimated for a pond planned to be built with digital elevation maps. For this purpose, storage volumes of 10 ponds operating in Hatay province were estimated by creating virtual ponds helping with ILWIS Geographical Information Systems software and compared with the volume values calculated as a result of field measurements. As a result of the comparison, R2 = 0.84 for the measured and predicted values for all ponds. Only the predicted and measured volume values for Karamanlı Pond were significantly different. Estimates made for 9 ponds except Karamanlı Pond gave very good results (R2 = 0.99, NSE> 0.75 and Pbias <0.25). According to these results, using the digital elevation map, the required reservoir volumes for the feasibility studies of the planned ponds could be estimated very well in nine out of 10 ponds in a very short time. It was suggested for Karamanlı Pond that the reasons of the differences in volume should be investigated.