DISTRIBUTED EROSION MODELLING USING REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Soil erosion is a severe environmental problem which is threatening the existing irrigation and drainage network. Several millions of hectares of land have been affected in India by soil erosion. Therefore it has become essential to delineate the areas affected by soil erosion as well as to estimate the quantity so that conservation measures could be taken. Runoff is a major factor which influences soil erosion to a large extent. In order to model the movement of sediment, it is first necessary to model the flow of water, which provides the basic dispersion mechanism. The problems associated with runoff and erosion are distributed in nature, so the use of distributed model is a must for such studies. Areal Nonpoint Source Watershed Environment Response Simulation (ANSWERS) model is a physically based, distributed model to simulate runoff and erosion processes in a catchment. The flexible model structure combined with the distributed nature and the physical interpretation of the runoff- erosion process, is expected to provide significant advantages over several models for a wide range of applications. ANSWERS model is well adopted to determine parameter values from remote sensing, where the observations are taken on a regular grid.