Application of Remote sensing information for Surface Water change in a tropical basin (Amazon)

Surface waters, which include rivers, lakes, wetlands and episodically inundated areas, play a crucial role in the global biochemical and the hydrological cycles. Rivers represent, through their discharges, one of the principal drivers of the ocean freshwater budget.

Floodplains and inundations regulate the river hydrology as a large part of the water input to a main river channel is processed through them. Understanding the seasonal/inter-annual variability of large-scale land surface water dynamics is thus crucial. Remote sensing (RS) techniques are being actively explored to provide a mean of monitoring surface waters at global and regional scales over long time periods. In order to monitor water balance changes in a major tropical basin, A globally applicable RS technique, developed to quantify spatial and temporal dynamics of inundated surfaces over the period 1993-2004 (Prigent et al., 2007), was used along with global precipitation data of TRMM, Evaporation estimations using Penman method and some in-situ data of discharge in Amazon (16 gage stations). Also, we applied Topography information of ASTR GDEM to delineate the basin in different gage stations. Water Balance equation was applied along with hydraulic routing of the surface runoff. In this model, most of the inputs are satellite based and we have used gage station information only for verification purpose.

ARE YOU APPLYING FOR A STUDENT TRAVEL AWARD: YES