IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON HYDROLOGICAL RESPONSE OF A RIVER BASIN

Abstract

Climate refers to regular weather conditions of a particular area and climate change involves changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme events. India faces uncertain patterns of precipitation and temperature. Due to climate change abrupt changes directly threatens the food security of a country. Madhya Pradesh is one of the India's largest states and has origin of tnany river systems on Central India. The Betwa river basin is spread over the parts of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Uttar Pradesh (UP) states. The study are of the Betwa basin (= 43544 km2) is located in Central India between 770 10 and 800 WE longitudes and 220 54 to 26° 05'N latitudes. The present research study has been planned with the specific objectives of To study the land use/ land cover changes in the Betwa basin using satellite data. (2) Establishment of relationship between land use/ land cover and hydroclimatic variables i.e. rainfall, temperature and runoff in the Betwa basin. (3) Estimation of runoff of the Betwa using SCS-Curve Number method. To meet the objectives, climate data (rainfall and temperature), satellite data, soil data were collected for the Betwa basin. ERI)AS Imagine V9.2 and ArcGIS V9.3 sofiwares were used in this study for classification and analysis of satellite data. For Betwa basin, land use/ land cover changes were estimated using remote sensing and GIS technique. Supervised classification method was used to classify raster images into land use/ land cover maps in six different classes. NDVI method is used to estimate vegetation of the study area. Two spectral bands (near-infrared and red) of satellite image were used in NDVI calculation for the year 1998, 2000, 2002, 2009 and 2011. Estimated vegetation is further used in establishment of relationship with climatic parameter. To study the historic changes in hydroclimalic varibles rainfall and temperature variables were relates with forest cover and vegetation using linear regression technique. Further, runoff of basin is also related with two climatic parameters (rainfall and temperature) on monthly and seasonal basis. Finally, SCS-Curve Number method was used to estimate the runoff of the basin.