Hydrologic Calculator: An Educational Interface for Hydrological Processes Analysis

Abstract

Hydrology, which deals with the study of water, is one of the fundamental courses to the undergraduate program of many disciplines: civil engineering, agricultural engineering, earth sciences, environmental sciences, geography, etc.  This course covers various events of the hydrological cycle, namely, rainfall, runoff, hydrograph, infiltration, evapotranspiration, and flood routing. These events involve a large number of techniques and methods for the analysis, which are time-consuming.  To enhance the learning, this study presents a tool called ‘Hydrologic Calculator’, an educational interface with eight modules for analyzing the various hydrological related events. In addition, ‘Help’ module in ‘Hydrologic Calculator’ provides a thorough understanding of the theory and methodology adopted for solving the different hydrological problems. Hydrologic Calculator includes a graphical user interface, which helps in input data preparation and output display in both graphical and tabular forms. Besides, it also provides detailed results in log (.txt) format. All the eight modules of the software were tested using the available published data. The validation results obtained using Hydrologic Calculator were in good agreement with the respective results given in the source. Thus, Hydrologic Calculator can be used as a professional computer tool for teaching and analyzing different hydrological processes.