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| Titel |
Assessing the hydrologic-budget components based on field- and remote-sensing data of the Sutlej-Valley, western Himalaya. |
| VerfasserIn |
Hendrik Wulf, Bodo Bookhagen, Dirk Scherler |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2010
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 12 (2010) |
| Datensatznummer |
250037138
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The Himalaya is the source of major Asian rivers, which provide drinking water and sustain
agriculture, livestock, and electricity through hydropower for hundreds of million people in
the Indo-Gangetic Plain. These rivers are fed by a combination of rainfall, snowfall, and
glacial melting. Liquid precipitation mainly falls during the Indian Summer Monsoon season,
whereas snowfall originates form winter westerlies. Due to the remoteness of the Himalaya
mountains there exist little reliable information about spatiotemporal precipitation
quantities. In addition, there is virtually no comprehensive understanding of glacial
melting due to the lack of mass balancing. This knowledge, however, is crucial to
understand and predict the consequences of climate change in this densely populated
region.
In this study, we attempt to quantify the discharge components for the Sutlej River from
2001 to 2007. The Sutlej River (~55,000 km2) is the third largest river draining the Himalaya
by area and receives ~50% of its annual moisture budget during winter precipitation. We
combine remote-sensing data with ground measurements to calibrate and validate a
hydrologic model to distinguish between the discharge components. Our distributed enhanced
temperature index model captures runoff derived from rainfall, snow- and glacial melts and
losses to evapotranspiration within 500x500 m grid cells. We utilize the MODerate
Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite to derive
fractional snow cover, surface albedo, cloud cover, mean daily surface temperature, and
evapotranspiration. Rainfall distribution is obtained by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission (TRMM) product 2B31, which we scaled by 19 weather stations within the Sutlej
catchment. We mapped glaciers by classifying snow- and cloudless Landsat ETM+ scenes
and incorporated debris covered glacial tongues based on high-resolution imagery and
morphological characteristics from Google Earth. We further computed global solar
radiation based on a digital elevation model (SRTM) and validated it with ground
data.
Our study models the Sutlej River as an entity and 7 sub catchments that have varying
discharge contributions. In addition, our approach is able to quantify river discharge in
previously ungauged sub-catchments of the Sutlej to estimate its hydroelectric power
potential. |
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