Optimal Selection of Number and Location of Meteo-Hydrological Monitoring Networks on Vu Gia – Thu Bon River Basin using GIS

Meteorological data play a particularly important role in hydrologic research because the climate and weather of an area exert a profound influence on most hydrologic processes. Meanwhile, hydrological data are critical for performing a range of purposes, including water resources assessment, impacts of climate change and flood forecasting and warning. It can be said that the prevention of disasters caused by floods and droughts would be impossible without rational forecasting technology based on an understanding of the rainfall-runoff phenomenon and statistical analysis of past hydrological data, which cannot be achieved without meteo-hydrological observations. The lack of adequate meteo-hydrological data affects the ability to model, predict and plan for catastrophic events such as floods and droughts which have obvious negative impacts on public health and socio-economic aspects. The accurate estimation of the spatial distribution of meteorological and hydrological parameters requires a dense network of instruments, which entails large installation and operational costs. It is thus necessary to optimize the number and location of meteo-hydrological stations. This paper presents a GIS-based approach to establishing an optimal meteo-hydrological station network on Vu Gia- Thu Bon river basin for developing an up-to-date real time flood warning system. Based on statistical analysis of the annual rainfall total data at 9 existing gauges in the study area from 1980 to 2013, it showed that the error of the existing network was about 7.47%. Considering 9 rain gauges as a standard representative of rainfall over the region, if the error decreases from 7.47% to 5%, the number of additional rain gauges should be 20. For adequate and economical network design, these additional rain gauges were spatially distributed between the different isohyetals after considering the relative distances between rain gauges, their accessibility, personnel required for making observations using multi-layers analysis and spatial interpolation. For hydrological stations, based on consideration existing network with the requirements set out by the flood warning system, the number of stations should be five. In terms of spatial distribution, three stations were distributed across two main tributaries of Vu Gia- Thu Bon river basin, behind the dams for water discharge calibration and the others were located on downstream for water stage calibration. The results of the study provided a scientific approach can be applied to optimizing the meteo-hydrological station network over the river basin.