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| Titel |
Mackenzie River Delta morphological change based on Landsat time series |
| VerfasserIn |
Jenni-Mari Vesakoski, Petteri Alho, David Gustafsson, Berit Arheimer, Kristina Isberg |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2015
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 17 (2015) |
| Datensatznummer |
250109800
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2015-9739.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Arctic rivers are sensitive and yet quite unexplored river systems to which the climate change
will impact on. Research has not focused in detail on the fluvial geomorphology of the Arctic
rivers mainly due to the remoteness and wideness of the watersheds, problems with data
availability and difficult accessibility. Nowadays wide collaborative spatial databases in
hydrology as well as extensive remote sensing datasets over the Arctic are available and they
enable improved investigation of the Arctic watersheds. Thereby, it is also important to
develop and improve methods that enable detecting the fluvio-morphological processes based
on the available data. Furthermore, it is essential to reconstruct and improve the
understanding of the past fluvial processes in order to better understand prevailing and future
fluvial processes.
In this study we sum up the fluvial geomorphological change in the Mackenzie River
Delta during the last ~30 years. The Mackenzie River Delta (~13Â000 km2) is
situated in the North Western Territories, Canada where the Mackenzie River enters to
the Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean near the city of Inuvik. Mackenzie River Delta is
lake-rich, productive ecosystem and ecologically sensitive environment. Research
objective is achieved through two sub-objectives: 1) Interpretation of the deltaic river
channel planform change by applying Landsat time series. 2) Definition of the
variables that have impacted the most on detected changes by applying statistics
and long hydrological time series derived from Arctic-HYPE model (HYdrologic
Predictions for Environment) developed by Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological
Institute. According to our satellite interpretation, field observations and statistical
analyses, notable spatio-temporal changes have occurred in the morphology of the
river channel and delta during the past 30 years. For example, the channels have
been developing in braiding and sinuosity. In addition, various linkages between
the studied explanatory variables, such as land cover, precipitation, evaporation,
discharge, snow mass and temperature, were found. The significance of this research is
emphasised by the growing population, increasing tourism, and economic actions in the
Arctic mainly due to the ongoing climate change and technological development. |
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