But now, water resources are under immense pressure due to various factors and need a variety of information in order to take timely and informed decisions for efficient management of water. Generally, in water resources engineering and management projects in Indus Basin the traditional methods of hydrographic surveying are adopted, although these methods served the purpose to a large extent in the past. Hydrographic Survey, Bathymetric Survey, Tarbela Reservoir, Reservoir Capacity, Differential GPS, Echosounderĭata collected through hydrographic surveying play a pivotal role in decision making for short term and long term planning, operation and management of the reservoir. The study was applied to Tarbela Reservoir, Pakistan. Post-processing is performed after conducting a survey in order to improve quality of data by filtering errors and producing the end product like reservoir underwater terrain, development of reservoir stage-area and stage-storage relationships, etc. Then, on site a combination of computer hardware, echosounder, differential global positioning system (DGPS), survey vessel and survey crew is made. The process of surveying starts from in-house planning using specialized geo-spatial softwares. The approach develops an integrated environment of hydrographic surveying comprising human, hardware and software.

In this study, an integrated approach for hydrographic surveying is introduced and evaluated in terms of its efficiency in comparison with the traditional methods of hydrographic surveying.

As water resources are under immense pressure due to a variety of factors, such inefficient methods are not acceptable for efficient water management. Traditional approaches to perform hydrographic surveying in Indus Basin are time consuming, laborious, comparatively inaccurate and costly. These parameters play a pivotal role in any planning, management and operation activity of the reservoirs. Hydrographic surveying in reservoirs is a key activity in order to collect data for a variety of purposes like estimation of storage capacity, rate and pattern of sediment deposition, movement of underwater sediment delta and reservoir routing, etc.

Received 8 August 2014 revised 9 September 2014 accepted 8 October 2014 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). 1 Water Resources Engineering Program, University of Kurdistan Hewler, Kurdistan Region, IraqĢMM Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd., Lahore, PakistanģWater and Power Development Authority, Tarbela Dam Project, Haripur, PakistanĮmail: © 2014 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

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