ABSTRACT
Due to financial, technical, and other constraints, many of the potential rivers remain ungauged, and practicing engineers in the field of hydrology are facing the problem of inadequate data that arises from poorly developed hydrological networks. They prefer to use simple empirical methods rather than more scientifically based approaches to estimate peak flows at ungauged sites. Methods to estimate the unit hydrographs (UHs) for ungauged watersheds are useful to hydrologic engineers. For practical applications, the analysis and construction of design hydrographs should be kept simple and possibly on the basis of analytical relationships. Most procedures seek to establish relationships between parameters used to describe the UH and parameters used to describe the basin. Many studies have been conducted for the empirical synthesis of UH relating quantitative geomorphology of a basin to its hydrological characteristics by which a representative basin could be used to develop a synthetic unit hydrograph (SUH) for a number of basins within hydrologically similar regions. Considering all these facts, this chapter is intended to provide a computationally simple and rapid procedure to use dimensional analysis techniques for empirical modeling in flood design for the development of SUHs for small ungauged basins.
