Flow Routing Calculations For Water Resources Management Using Spreadsheets

Abstract

Flow routing calculations are very important for water resources engineers for analyzing and designing water engineering systems such as reservoirs, stocmwater conduits and detention ponds, spillways, pumping stations, etc. The present paper introduces spreadsheets as an efficient computational tool to carry out routing calculations. After reviewing many of the flow routing procedures used by engineers and their applications for reservoir, river and catchment routing, a series of examples are worked out to illustrate the use of spreadsheets to carry out the routing calculations for the selected procedures. The paper emphasizes the superiority of spreadsheets over other available methods as a computational tool for routing calculations. Spreadsheets are both valuable for design purposes, and an excellent educational tool in the area or computational hydrology.