No abstract

Adequate water resource management is essential for fulfilling ecosystem and human needs. Nainital Lake is a popular lake in Uttarakhand State in India, attracting lakhs of tourists annually. Locals also use the lake water for domestic purposes and irrigation. The increasing impact of climate change and over-exploration of water from lakes make their regular monitoring key to implementing effective conservation measures and preventing substantial degradation. In this study, dynamic change in the water spread area of Nainital Lake from 2001 to 2018 has been investigated using the multiband rationing indices, namely normalized difference water index (NDWI), modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), and water ratio index (WRI). The model has been developed in QGIS 3.4 software. A physical GPS survey of the lake was conducted to check the accuracy of these indices. Furthermore, to determine the trend in water surface area for a studied period, a non-parametric Mann–Kendall test was used. San’s slope estimator test determined the magnitude of the trend and total percentage change. The result of the physical survey shows that NDWI was the best method, with an accuracy of 96.94%. Hence, the lake water spread area trend is determined based on calculated NDWI values. The lake water spread area significantly decreased from March to June and July to October at a 5% significance level. The maximum decrease in water spread area has been determined from March to June (7.7%), which was followed by the period July to October (4.67%) and then November to February (2.79%). The study results show that the lake’s water spread area decreased sharply for the analyzed period. The study might be helpful for the government, policymakers, and water experts to make plans for reclaiming and restoring Nainital Lake. This study is very helpful in states such as Uttarakhand, where physical mapping is not possible every time due to its tough topography and climate conditions.

The present study is mainly focused on to detection of changing trend in rainfall and temperature for Udaipur district situated in the Rajasthan state of India. The district situated in the western part of India which obtained less rainfall as compared with the average rainfall of India. In the present article, the approach has been tried to analysis to detect rainfall trend, maximum temperature trend and minimum temperature trend for the area. For this daily rainfall data of 39 years (1975 to 2013) add seasonally and the temperature has been calculated by averaging of daily temperature for a period of 39 years. For determining the trend the year has been shared out into four seasons like the winter season, pre-monsoon season, monsoon season and post-monsoon season. To obtained magnitude of trend San’s slope estimator test has been used and for significance in trend Mann-Kendall statistics test has been applied. The results obtained for the study show significantly decreasing rainfall trend for the season winter and season post-monsoon whereas pre-monsoon and monsoon show increasing rainfall trend. The maximum temperature of pre-monsoon and monsoon months shows a significantly increasing trend whereas, in minimum temperature, winter season and pre-monsoon season shows an increasing trend which is significant at 10% level of significance and post-monsoon shows a decreasing trend which is also significant at 10% level of significance.