Remote Sensing-Remote Sensing Applications

Watershed management

MODULE 8 LECTURE NOTES 1

REMOTE SENSING APPLICATIONS IN WATERSHED MANAGEMENT

1. Introduction
Scientific planning and management is essential for the conservation of land and water
resources for optimum productivity. Watersheds being the natural hydrologic units, such
studies are generally carried out at watershed scale and are broadly referred under the term
watershed management. It involves assessment of current resources status, complex modeling
to assess the relationship between various hydrologic components, planning and
implementation of land and water conservation measures etc.
Remote sensing via aerial and space-borne platforms acts as a potential tool to supply the
essential inputs to the land and water resources analysis at different stages in watershed
planning and management. Water resource mapping, land cover classification, estimation of
water yield and soil erosion, estimation of physiographic parameters for land prioritization
and water harvesting are a few areas where remote sensing techniques have been used.
This lecture covers the remote sensing applications in water resources management under the
following five classes:
Water resources mapping
Estimation of watershed physiographic parameters
Estimation of hydrological and meteorological variables
Watershed prioritization
Water conservation
2. Water resources mapping
Identification and mapping of the surface water boundaries has been one of the simplest and
direct applications of remote sensing in water resources studies. Water resources mapping
using remote sensing data require fine spatial resolution so as to achieve accurate delineation
of the boundaries of the water bodies.
Optical remote sensing techniques, with their capability to provide very fine spatial resolution
have been widely used for water resources mapping. Water absorbs most of the energy in

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NIR and MIR wavelengths giving darker tones in the bands, and can be easily differentiated
from the land and vegetation.
Fig. 1 shows images of a part of the Krishna river basin in different bands of the Landsat
ETM+. In the VIS bands (bands 1, 2 and 3) the contrast between water and other features are
not very significant. On the other hand, the IR bands (bands 4 and 5) show a sharp contrast
between them due to the poor reflectance of water in the IR region of the EMR spectrum.

Fig. 1 Landsat ETM+ images of a part of the Krishna river basin in different spectral bands
(Nagesh Kumar and Reshmidevi, 2013)
Poor cloud penetration capacity and poor capability to map water resources under thick
vegetation cover are the major drawbacks of the optical remote sensing techniques.
Use of active microwave sensor helps to overcome these limitations as the radar waves can
penetrate the clouds and the vegetation cover to some extent. In microwave remote sensing,
water surface provides specular reflection of the microwave radiation, and hence very little
energy is scattered back compared to the other land features. The difference in the energy
received back at the radar sensor is used for differentiating, and to mark the boundaries of the
water bodies.

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3. Estimation of watershed physiographic parameters

This section covers the remote sensing applications in estimating watershed physiographic
parameters and the land use / land cover information.
3.1 Watershed physiographic parameters
Various watershed physiographic parameters that can be obtained from remotely sensed data
include watershed area, size and shape, topography, drainage pattern and landforms.
Stereoscopic attribute of aerial photographs or satellite images permit quantitative assessment
of landforms and evaluation of basin topography, which can be used to develop or update the
topographic maps. With the help of satellite remote sensing, global scale digital elevation
models (DEMs) are available today at fine spatial resolution and reasonable vertical
accuracy. DEM from the Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) and ASTER GDEM
are examples. SRTM DEM provides near-global DEM at 90m spatial resolution and 16m
vertical accuracy. Airborne laser altimeters also provide quick and accurate measurements for
evaluating changes in land surface features and are effective tools to ascertain watershed
properties.
Fine resolution DEMs have been used to extract the drainage network/ pattern using the flow
tracing algorithms. The drainage information can also be extracted from the optical images
using digital image processing techniques.
The drainage information may be further used to generate secondary information such as
structure of the basin, basin boundary, stream orders, stream length, stream frequency,
bifurcation ratio, stream sinuosity, drainage density and linear aspects of channel systems etc.
Fig. 2 shows the ASTER GDEM for a small region in the Krishna Basin in North Karnataka
and the drainage network delineated from it using the flow tracing algorithm included in the
spatial analyst tool box of ArcGIS. Fig. 2(b) also shows the stream orders assigned to each
of the delineated streams.

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Fig.2 (a) ASTER GDEM of a small region in the Krishna Basin (b) and the stream network
delineated from the DEM

3.2 Land use / land cover classification

Detailed land use / land cover map is another important input that remote sensing can yield
for hydrologic analysis.
Land cover classification using multispectral remote sensing data is one of the earliest, and
well established remote sensing applications in water resources studies. With the capability of
the remote sensing systems to provide frequent temporal sampling and the fine spatial
resolution, it is possible to analyze the dynamics of land use / land cover pattern, and also its
impact on the hydrologic processes.
Use of hyper-spectral imageries helps to achieve further improvement in the land use / land
cover classification, wherein the spectral reflectance values recorded in the narrow
contiguous bands are used to differentiate different land use classes which show close
resemblance with each other. Identification of crop types using hyper-spectral data is an
example.
With the help of satellite remote sensing, land use land cover maps at near global scale are
available today for hydrological applications. European Space Agency (ESA) has released a

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global land cover map of 300 m resolution, with 22 land cover classes at 73% accuracy (Fig.
3).

Fig. 3. Global 300 m land cover classification from the European Space Agency (Source:
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/ESA_global_land_cover_map_avail
able_online)

4. Estimation of hydrological and meteorological variables

Hydrological processes such as precipitation and evapotranspiration are generally used as
inputs to the hydrological models to simulate other processes such as runoff (surface and subsurface), storage change in the unsaturated zone, and ground water flow. This section covers
the remote sensing applications in estimating precipitation, evapotranspiration and soil
moisture.
4.1 Precipitation
Remote sensing techniques have been used to provide information about the occurrence of
rainfall and its intensity. Basic concept behind the satellite rainfall estimation is the
differentiation of precipitating clouds from the non-precipitating clouds (Gibson and Power,
2000) by relating the brightness of the cloud observed in the imagery to the rainfall
intensities.

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Satellite remote sensing uses both optical and microwave remote sensing (both passive and
active) techniques.
Table 1 lists some of the important satellite rainfall data sets, satellites used for the data
collection and the organizations that control the generation and distribution of the data.

Table 1. Details of some of the important satellite rainfall products (Nagesh Kumar and
Reshmidevi, 2013)
Program

Organization

World
Weather
Watch

WMO

TRMM

NASA
JAXA

Characteristics and source of data

VIS, IR

1-4 km spatial, and

30 min. temporal resolution
(http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/index_en.html)

PERSIANN CHRS

CMORPH

Spectral bands
used

NOAA

VIS, IR
Sub-daily
Passive & active 0.25o (~27 km) spatial resolution
(ftp://trmmopen.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/merged)
microwave

IR

Microwave

0.25o spatial resolution

Temporal resolution: 30 min. aggregated to 6 hrs.
(http://chrs.web.uci.edu/persiann/)
0.08 deg (8 km) spatial and 30 min. temporal
resolution
(http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/janowiak/cmorph_de
scription.html)

Acronyms
CHRS: Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing, University of California, USA
CMORPH: Climate Prediction Center (CPC) MORPHing technique
NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, USA
NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA
PERSIANN: Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Network
TRMM: Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission
WMO: World Meteorological Organization

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4.2. Evapotranspiration
Evapotranspiration (ET) represents the water and energy flux between the land surface and
the lower atmosphere. ET fluxes are controlled by the feedback mechanism between the
atmosphere and the land surface, soil and vegetation characteristics, and the hydrometeorological conditions.
There are no direct methods available to estimate the actual ET by means of remote sensing
techniques. Remote sensing application in the ET estimation is limited to the estimation of
the surface conditions like albedo, soil moisture, surface temperature, and vegetation
characteristics like normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) and leaf area index
(LAI). The data obtained from remote sensing are used in different models to simulate the
actual ET.
Courault et al. (2005) grouped the remote sensing data-based ET models into four different
classes:

Empirical direct methods: Use the empirical equations to relate the difference in the
surface air temperature to the ET.

Residual methods of the energy budget: Use both empirical and physical
parameterization. Example: SEBAL (Bastiaanssen et al., 1998), FAO-56 method
(Allen at al., 1998)

Deterministic models: Simulate the physical process between the soil, vegetation and
atmosphere making use of remote sensing data such as Leaf Area Index (LAI) and
soil moisture. SVAT (Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Transfer) model is an example
(Olioso et al., 1999).

Vegetation index methods: Use the ground observation of the potential or reference
ET. Actual ET is estimated from the reference ET by using the crop coefficients
obtained from the remote sensing data (Allen et al., 2005; Neale et al., 2005).

Optical remote sensing using the VIS and NIR bands have been commonly used to estimate
the input data required for the ET estimation algorithms.
As a part of the NASA / EOS project to estimate global terrestrial ET from earths land
surface by using satellite remote sensing data, MODIS Global Terrestrial Evapotranspiration

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Project (MOD16) provides global ET data sets at regular grids of 1 sq.km for the land surface
at 8-day, monthly and annual intervals for the period 2000-2010.
4.3 Soil moisture estimation
Remote sensing techniques of soil moisture estimation are advantageous over the
conventional in-situ measurement approaches owing to the capability of the sensors to
capture spatial variation over a large aerial extent. Moreover, depending upon the revisit time
of the satellites, frequent sampling of an area and hence more frequent soil moisture
measurements are feasible.
Fig. 4 shows the global average monthly soil moisture in May extracted from the integrated
soil moisture database of the European Space Agency- Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI).

Fig 4. Global monthly average soil moisture in May from the CCI data
(Source: http://www.esa-soilmoisture-cci.org/)

Remote sensing of the soil moisture requires information below the ground surface and
therefore mostly confined to the use of thermal and microwave bands of the EMR spectrum.
Remote sensing of the soil moisture is based on the variation in the soil properties caused due
to the presence of water. Soil properties generally monitored for soil moisture estimation
include soil dielectric constant, brightness temperature, and thermal inertia.
Though the remote sensing techniques are giving reasonably good estimation of the soil
moisture, due to the poor surface penetration capacity of the microwave signals, it is

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considered to be effective in retrieving the moisture content of the surface soil layer of
maximum 10 cm thickness. In the recent years, attempts have been made to extract the soil
moisture of the entire root zone with the help of remote sensing data. Such methods
assimilate the remote sensing derived surface soil moisture data with physically based
distributed models to simulate the root zone soil moisture. For example, Das et al. (2008)
used the Soil-Water-Atmosphere-Plant (SWAP) model for simulating the root zone soil
moisture by assimilating the aircraft-based remotely sensed soil moisture into the model.
Some of the satellite based sensors that have been used for retrieving the soil moisture
information are the following.

Passive microwave sensors: SMMR, AMSR-E and SSM/I

Active microwave sensors (radar): Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) aboard the

EUMETSAT MetOp satellite

Thermal sensors: Data from the thermal bands of the MODIS sensor onboard Terra
satellite have also been used for retrieving soil moisture data.

Use of hyper-spectral remote sensing technique has been recently employed to improve the
soil moisture simulation. Hyper-spectral monitoring of the soil moisture uses reflectivity in
the VIS and the NIR bands to identify the changes in the spectral reflectance curves due to
the presence of soil moisture (Yanmin et al., 2010). Spectral reflectance measured in multiple
narrow bands in the hyperspectral image helps to extract most appropriate bands for the soil
moisture estimation, and to identify the changes in the spectral reflectance curves due to the
presence of soil moisture.

5. Watershed characterization and prioritization

Watershed characterization involves the measurement and analysis of various hydrogeological and geo-morphological parameters, soil and land use characteristics etc. (Rao and
Raju, 2010).
Watershed prioritization is the ranking of different watersheds or sub-watersheds within a
watershed for any specific application based on the watershed characteristics.

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Examples:

Watershed prioritization considering the erosion risk, using parameters such as relief
ratio, drainage density, drainage texture and bifurcation ratio (Chaudhary and Sharma,
1984).

Watershed prioritization based on the sediment yield index (Khan et al., 2001)

Watershed characterization and land suitability evaluation using land use/ land cover,
soil data, slope, and soil degradation status (Saxena et al., 2000)

Prioritization of micro-catchments based on morphological parameters (Raju and

Nagesh Kumar, 2012)

Fig. 5 shows a sample watershed characterization map of the Northern United States for
water quality risks

Fig.5 Watershed characterization of the Northern United States for water quality risk
Source: http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/futures/current_conditions/soil_water_conservation/

Remote sensing techniques have been effectively used for watershed characterization and
prioritization to identify the water potential, erosion risk, management requirements etc.

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Remote sensing helps in obtaining the database essential for such analyses. Input data that
have been generated using remote sensing techniques for such studies includes physiographic
and morphometric parameters, land use / land cover information and hydrological parameters
as mentioned in the previous section.

4.4.1 Case study: Prioritization of micro-catchments in the Kherthal catchment in

Rajasthan based on morphology (Source: Raju and Nagesh Kumar, 2012)
Kherthal catchment in Rajasthan lies between latitudes 24o51 and 25o58 N and longitudes
73o8 and 73o19 E. The catchment consists of 25 micro-catchments and spreads over
approximately 159 km2 area.

Fig.6 Location map of the Kherthal catchment

Raju and Nagesh Kumar (2012) considered a set of seven geomorphologic parameters to
prioritize the micro-catchments in the Kherthal catchment for the watershed conservation and
management practices.

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Morphologic parameters considered are the following.

Drainage density (Dd)

Bifurcation ratio (Rb)

Stream frequency (Fu)

Texture ratio (T)

Form factor (Rf)

Elongation ratio (Re)

Circulatory ratio (Rc)

Details of these parameters are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Description of the morphologic parameters used in the study

These morphologic parameters were interpreted / calculated for all the micro-catchments by
using IRS LISS-III images and Survey of India topographic sheets of 1:50,000 scale.
22 out of the 25 micro-catchments were considered for the analysis. Values of the
geomorphologic parameters for these 22 micro-catchments are given in Table 3.

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Table 3. Morphologic parameters for the micro-catchments in the Kherthal catchment

For the prioritization, the maximum values for the first 4 parameters and the minimum values
for the remaining 3 parameters were considered as the evaluation criteria. These criteria were
evaluated using three methods: compromise programming, technique for order preference by
similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) and compound parameter approach (CPAP) (More
details can be found in Raju and Nagesh Kumar, 2012).
In the CPAP, micro-catchments were ranked for the seven parameters individually and the
average of the seven ranks was used as the compound parameter, which was then used to
rank the micro-catchments. Table 4 shows the individual ranks of the parameters, compound
parameter and the corresponding ranks of the micro-catchments.

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Table 4. Ranking of the micro-catchments by compound ranking

Sub catchments A6, A3 and A10 were identified as the highest priority micro-catchments in
the Kherthal watershed.
From the study, analysis of the geomorphologic parameters was found to be very effective in
assessing the geo-morphological and hydrological characteristics of the micro-catchments.

4.5 Water conservation and rainwater harvesting

Rainwater harvesting, wherein water from the rainfall is stored for future usage, is an
effective water conservation measure particularly in the arid and semi-arid regions.
Rainwater harvesting techniques are highly location specific. Selection of appropriate water
harvesting technique requires extensive field analysis to identify the rainwater harvesting
potential of the area, and the physiographic and terrain characteristics of the locations. It
depends on the amount of rainfall and its distribution, land topography, soil type and depth,
and local socio-economic factors (Rao and Raju, 2010).

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Rao and Raju (2010) had listed a set of parameters which need to be analyzed to fix
appropriate locations for the water harvesting structures. These are

Rainfall

Land use or vegetation cover

Topography and terrain profile

Soil type & soil depth

Hydrology and water resources

Socio-economic and infrastructure conditions

Environmental and ecological impacts

Remote sensing techniques had been identified as potential tools to generate the basic
information required for arriving at the most appropriate methods for each area.
In remote sensing aided analysis, various data layers were prepared and brought into a
common GIS framework. Further, multi-criteria evaluation algorithms were used to aggregate
the information from the basic data layers. Various decision rules were evaluated to arrive at
the most appropriate solution as shown in Fig. 6.

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Fig.6. Schematic representation showing the remote sensing data aggregation in evaluating
the suitability of various water harvesting techniques
(Images are taken from Rao and Raju 2010 and aggregated here)

The capability to provide large areal coverage at a fine spatial resolution makes remote
sensing techniques highly advantageous over the conventional field-based surveys.

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Bibliogrtaphy / Further Reading

1. Allen RG, Pereira LS, Raes D, Smith M (1998). Crop evapotranspiration: guidelines
for computing crop water requirements Irrigation and Drainage Paper 56, United
Nations FAO, Rome.
2. Allen RG, Tasumi M, Morse A, Trezza R (2005). A Landsat-based energy balance
and evapotranspiration model in Western US water rights regulation and planning
Irrig. and Drain. Syst., 19(3/4), pp 251268.
3. Bastiaanssen WGM, Menenti M, Feddes RA, Holtslag AA (1998). A remote sensing
surface energy balance algorithm for land (SEBAL) J. Hydrol., 212213, pp 198212.
4. Chaudhary, R.S. and Sharma, ED. (1998). Erosion hazard assessment and treatment
prioritization of Giri River catchment, North Western Himalayas. Indian J. Soil
Conservation, 26(1): 6-1.
5. Courault D, Seguin B, Olioso A (2005). Review on estimation of evapotranspiration
from remote sensing data: From empirical to numerical modeling approaches Irrig.
and Drain. Syst., 19, pp 223249.
6. Das NN, Mohanty BP, Cosh MH, Jackson TJ (2008). Modeling and assimilation of
root zone soil moisture using remote sensing observations in Walnut Gulch
Watershed during SMEX04 Remtoe Sens. Environ., 112, pp: 415-429. doi:
doi:10.1016/j.rse.2006.10.027.
7. Gibson PJ, Power CH (2000). Introductory Remote Sensing- Digital Image
Processing and Applications. Routledge Pub., London.
8. Khan MA, Gupta VP, Moharana PC (2001). Watershed prioritization using remote
sensing and geographical information system: a case study from Guhiya, India J.
Arid Environ., 49, pp 465475.
9. Nagesh Kumar D and Reshmidevi TV (2013). Remote sensing applications in water
resources J. Indian Institute of Sci., 93(2), 163-188.
10. Neale C, Jayanthi H, Wright JL (2005). Irrigation water management using high
resolution airborne remote sensing Irrig. Drain. Syst., 19(3/4), pp 321336.

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11. Olioso A, Chauki,H, Courault D, Wigneron JP (1999). Estimation of

Evapotranspiration and Photosynthesis by Assimilation of Remote Sensing Data into
SVAT Models Remote Sens. Environ., 68, pp 341356.
12. Raju KS and Nagesh Kumar D (2012) Prioritization of micro-catchments based on
morphology Water Management- Proc. Institution of Civil Eng., 166 (WM7) 367380.
13. Rao VV and Raju PV (2010) Water resources management In Remote Sensing
Applications (Roy PS, Dwivedi RS, Vijayan D Eds.), National Remote Sensing Centre,
Hyderabad.
14. Saxena RK, Verma KS, Chary GR, Srivastrava R, Batrhwal AK (2000). IRS-1C data
application in watershed characterization and management Int. J. Remote Sens., 21
(17), pp 3197-3208
15. Yanmin Y, Wei N, Youqi C, Yingbin H, Pengqin T (2010).

Soil Moisture

Monitoring Using Hyper-Spectral Remote Sensing Technology In 2010 Second IITA

International Conference on Geosci. Remote Sens., pp 373- 376, IEEE.

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