Hydrological analysis of Murat River Basin by gis

The overall objective of this study was to determine a practical rainfall-runoff relation by linear method. The hydrologic characteristics of Murat River which is the largest tributary of the Euphrates River rises north of Lake Van near Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey to an elevation of 2720 m above sea level, approximately 722 km long with total catchment area 40496, 000 square kilometres (km2) were determined by standard Digital Elevation Model (DEM) in Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS techniques are useful not only in obtaining data from a basin; they also provide valuable contribution in performing the spatial distribution of hydrological data in assessment of water resources projects. To derive several data sets that collectively describes the drainage patterns of the catchments Arc Hydro tools are used, to generate data on flow direction, flow accumulation, stream definition, stream segmentation, and watershed delineation raster analysis is performed. These data are then used to develop a vector representation of catchment and drainage lines from selected points. Hydrological processing such as, map of sub-catchments, characteristics of sub-catchments, river network map and river network characteristics have been determined by employing ArcHydro tools. On the other hand hydrological analysis such as, slope map, Thiessen polygon map, Thiessen polygon areas were defined by Arc Toolbox. The annual total discharge of the stream flow at seven flow measurement stations (FMS) along the river and the annual total precipitations measured at nineteen rainfall measurement stations within and surrounding the Murat River basin were used here in order to perform the hydrological analysis of the basin. The rainfall-runoff coefficient for the whole basin was found to be 0.6.