HEAVY RAINFALL AND DROUGHT POTENTIAL IN THE CHAO PHRAYA RIVER BASIN, THAILAND

Abstract

 Large-scale watersheds need integrative water management because large-scale watersheds have a large variety of water-related issues like flash flooding, drought, quality, heavy rainfall etc. The purpose of this study is to propose both flood and drought risk potentials in large-scale watersheds for decision makers and/or administrators. In this paper, we discuss the flood and drought risk potentials based on 45-year rainfall data in the Chao Phraya River basin, Kingdom of Thailand. The Chao Phraya River basin was divided into 58 sub-basins, from which we estimated area-averaged rainfall using 873 rainfall stations data.
 We can identify the sub-basins which have high potential of heavy rainfall and drought. It is important to recognize that the whole Chao Phraya River basin has a tendency to drought during 1952-1997.
 Precipitation is the most important factor which decides the potential of water-related disaster like flooding and drought, and then we need to organize the behavior of precipitation statistically and stochastically.