LAND USE/ LAND COVER CHANGE ANALYSIS AND HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING OF AGLAR WATERSHED

Abstract

Land and water resources planning and management have become very crucial in the present days. The natural systems are subjected to degradation owing to various natural and anthropogenic factors. Due to advancement in the field of Remote Sensing and GIS techniques using high-resolution satellite imagery, it has become possible to answer the two most important questions - how was it like before and why is it like today. The watershed selected for land-use/ land-cover analysis is the Aglar watershed and for hydrological analysis, the Paligad watershed which is a sub-basin of Aglar watershed draining into Aglar River. For the study area of Aglar watershed, it was observed that while forests cover remained almost constant, the agricultural area decreased by 27.78% and bare land changed by 48.01%. The Kappa statistics values of 0.81 and 0.84 for the years 1993 and 2015 indicate good classification results. For hydrological studies it is well know that each system behaves differently and in order to effectively manage those systems, it is necessary to understand their behavior. In order to understand the behavior of a system and its response to inputs, the hydrological component of Hydrological Simulation Program – FORTRAN (HSPF) model was setup and calibrated for Paligad which is a sub-basin of Aglar watershed draining into Aglar River. The watershed selected for Land use/ Land cover (LULC) analysis is the Aglar watershed. The calibration was done manually and aided by an expert advice system called as HSPEXP+. It was observed that the annual simulated evapotranspiration was 55.92 inches, but the actual annual evapotranspiration observed for the area was 62.24 inches. The HSPF model was year calibrated for one for the hydrological data from the year 2014-2015. The results depicted that the model was well calibrated and simulated the stream flow accurately after calibration of the model. The coefficient of determination (R2) for the year 2014-2015 for the calibration on the basis of the monthly and daily flows was found as 0.83 and 0.63.