REMOTE SENSING AND GIS APPLICATION TO STUDY 40 IMPACT ON LAND AND WATER RESOURCES DUE TO CLIMATIC CHANGE

Abstract

Change Analysis due to climate is an important step in many environmental studies. A wide variety of methods have been developed in this concern. During this study, remote sensing images and GIS were used for climatic impact prediction in Uttarakhand, during the years of 1990-2010. It was assumed that climatic impact could be predicted using time series satellite imageries. Natural vegetation, urban area, forest cover etc. were chosen as main landuse classes to study. Rainfall and temperature data were used to find the effect of climatic change. Landuse/ Iandcover classes within several years were prepared using satellite images. Maximum likelihood supervised classification technique was adopted in this work. The detected changes in landuse classes were correlated with temperature and rainfall data of twenty one years. Landuse change index and climatic change index were created and find correlation between them. By the correlation of landuse change index and climatic change index it was found that Haridwar, Udham Singh Nagar and Dehradun districts were highly affected due to climatic change. Significant differences were observed as increasing temperature and decreasing rainfall. Finally, graphical models were used to present the changes.