Journal of Rural Development

Shailesh Chaure ¹, D. C. Gupta ², H. K. Solanki ³, Pramod Dubey ⁴

Affiliations
1 Govt. Holkar Science College, Indore, M.P., IN
2 Department of Earth Sciences, Barkatullah University, Bhopal, M.P., IN
3 National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, Hyderabad, IN
4 School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, M.P., IN

Abstract

In rural areas of low rainfall, roof top rainwater harvesting is an ideal method for collecting rainwater because it helps not only in meeting at least a part of the water requirement but also prevents storm runoff and flooding during heavy rains. Individual houses and buildings are the best units for collecting the roof water. In this work an interactive web-based GIS tool named RWRE (Roof Water Runoff Estimator) has been developed to estimate the runoff from the rooftops of the buildings. REWE tool was designed using open source geospatial development tools like Geoserver and OpenLayers. The developed tool provides a polygon drawing tool to delineate the rooftop of individual buildings. The area of rooftop of each building is listed. The runoff coefficient for each building is also taken as input. The annual average rainfall is required to calculate the total amount of water available from the rooftops of all the delineated buildings. For the testing and development of RWRE, the municipal area of Bhopal city of Madhya Pradesh was taken. This tool can be configured to be used for any rural or other area and can be of great help in planning and designing of the roof water harvesting structures as it quickly and accurately estimates the volume of water available from the buildings.

Keywords

Open Layers, Geoserver, Rooftops, Runoff.

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