Purpose and Scope of Hydrology:

 Specifically, Hydrology plays a basic role from the planning stage of new hydropower schemes, up to complete feasibility studies of the projects, even after the construction stage for improving the operation of Hydel power schemes. The hydrological series that represents variations in river flow throughout the year is utilized to estimate the power and energy production from the available stream flow. Installing gauging stations, collecting data, performing analysis of available water resources and design floods these are important tasks of Hydrology Section. This leads to an increasing need for real-time data acquisition system and flow forecasting methods.

The responsibility of the hydrology section is to present the hydrologic data in a systematic manner. For this purpose the hydrology section has installed 35 gauging stations in all the seven regions of KPK to collect the required data which include gauge heights, discharge measurements and suspended sediment. The data analysis is performed to determine the availability of water resources in different time scales and to provide stations statistics, mean daily discharge, with a monthly and the annual summary. The summary includes mean discharge, Specific discharge, runoff and volume of water. The annual summary also includes daily minimum and daily maximum for that particular year. Hydrology data is essential to determine the following:

·         Hydel power potential of different streams.

·         Design different components of a Hydel power project.

·         Design discharge of a Hydel power project.

·         Intensity of high floods for the safety of various structures of the Hydel power projects such as dam, intake structure, power channel, silt cleaning basins and power house.

·         Volume and size of reservoir.

·         Dry, wet and medium years of the Catchment area of the project.

·         Annual energy and plant factor of the scheme and selection of the Hydel power schemes, which are optimally economical.

Projects Area:

     The projects are restricted to the following seven regions of northern areas of KPK.

·         Upper Chitral

·         Lower Chitral

·         Dir Valleys

·         Swat Valleys

·         Indus Kohistan

·         Kaghan valley and

·         Mansehra west

The main objective of the hydrology section is summarized as under:

·         To install gauging net works on ungauged tributaries of the river Catchment in the above mentioned regions.

·         To operate and maintain the stations to ensure the quality of data.

·         To visit all stations for collection of data and flow measurement on monthly basis.

·         To enter the field data in PC compatible format after manual corrections.

·         To develop a data bank for storing the processed and raw field data.

·         To process the data to determine annual, monthly and daily statistics.

·         To obtain instantaneous high flow

·         To determine suspended sediment carrying capacity of the tributaries.

·         To prepare basic hydrologic database for private and public sectors interested in development of Hydel power resource.

 Existing Running Gauging stations: