Open technologies based hydrological model for reservoir management

Inclusion of hydrological modelling approaches for making water release decisions is not practiced among water practitioners of Sri Lanka due to inadequacy of quality data, high purchasing cost of modelling software and lack of expertise knowledge on handling modelling tools. During the rainy periods, they face difficulties in taking timely decisions on deciding the magnitude of inflows to the reservoirs, for the safe disposal of excess flow. Currently, the water from the reservoir is released once it reaches to a particular threshold. This creates floods in the lower basin due to the massive water flow released from the reservoirs. Therefore, for a low-income country, a total open source framework amalgamated with low cost open source hardware and free open source software, standards and data, was seen as the only possible mean to overcome the flood risk associated with reservoirs. Hence, the aim of this study is to demonstrate the capability of such a system in simulating the inflows to the reservoir, triggered during the rainfall events. The calibration and validation results of the model have discovered the capability of the open source technologies-based system in decision making pertaining to water resources management. As the model operates as a semi-distributed continuous model at hourly time-step, it doesn’t demand massive amount of data and not required to apply initial discharge at every occasion that the model runs.