Geographical Information System (GIS) in Water Resources Engineering

The world is getting populated day by day & the population explosion is creating pressure on all the natural resources & the necessity of spending the same in a judicious fashion is the cry of the day. The primal item of man use is water which is scarce as ever & the judicious spending of the same is necessary using a GIS monitored system, coupled with minimal use of fertiliser to maximise the crop growth at the minimal use of irrigation. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps & present the results of all these operations. In more generic sense GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries analyze the spatial information & edit data. The later part of the paper discusses the scope of GIS, its uncertanities, raster to vector translation, data representation, GIS in irrigation management, GIS for predicting the future irrigation demand growth, GIS based irrigation water demand estimation, etc. The paper further discusses GISAREG program in irrigation simulation with a special reference to GIS user-interface techniques in precision farming of rice leading to the GIS model in estimating the regionally distributed drought water demand. In a nutshell the paper discusses all the facets of application of GIS in mankind including GIS model in estimating the regionally distributed drought water demand.