First Blog, still from the Netherlands, Breda.

I'm working on my project for a couple of weeks now. The past weeks I spend a lot of time looking for data on precipitation, digital elevation models, runoff coefficients and runoff.

The objective is to generate a digital map of simulated river discharge, and write an algorithm that indicates potential micro-hydropower locations.

The idea ( and this has been done before on small scale ) is to derive streamflow from a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). This can be achieved by serveral ways, in Matlab or ArcGis. The Elevation data is free available at high resolutions, however deriving streamflows for very large areas is a big challenge.

When the flow directions per cell are generated, discharge has to be involved by either taking runoff data, or rainfall data multiplied with runoff coefficients, depending on the qualitiy and resolution of the data. Problems with tresholds, monthly variations etc. have to be accounted for.

In this phase we are still selecting data, and trying different techniques to derive stream flows and catchments, and see what gives the best results...

The coming weeks I will be working on this, and create a model, which has to be calibrated in Indonesia! But first... modelling...