Hydrological impacts of land use/land cover change in a large river basin in central–northern Thailand

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The purpose of this study is to determine the hydrological impacts of land use/land cover (LULC) change in the Yom watershed in central-northern Thailand over a 15-year period using an integration of remote sensing, Geographic Information System, statistical methods, and hydrological modelling. The LULC changes showed an expansion of urban areas by 132% (from 210 km 2 in 1990 to 488 km 2 in 2006). The Yom River's daily discharge long-term trend significantly increased at most of the measurement stations (p value <0.05), and the rate of increase in discharge at areas downstream of the rapid urbanisation was significantly greater than that at areas upstream. There were no significant long-term trends in precipitation characteristics in the basin, except for one station. The rate of change in discharge after changes in LULC showed a systematic increase over a range from 0.0039 to 0.0180 m 3 s −1 day −1 over a 15-year period, with the increase in urbanised area spanning a range from 81 to 149% in two flood-prone provinces. A rainfall-runoff model simulated a small increase (∼10%) in peak flows. The coupling of surface observations, remote sensing, and rainfall-runoff modeling demonstrated the impacts of changes in LULC on peak river discharge, hence flooding behaviour, of a major river in central-northern Thailand.

Impacts of land use change on climate

“…Most of the studies examine regional impacts of land surface states on climate (Costa and Pires, 2010;Fall et al, 2010aFall et al, , 2010bGe, 2010;Kishtawal et al, 2010;Mishra et al, 2010;Moore et al, 2010;Petchprayoon et al, 2010;Sertel et al, 2010;Takahashi et al, 2010;Tokairin et al, 2010;Xiao et al, 2010). However, several studies take a global perspective of land-cover consequences Kvalevåg et al, 2010;Lawrence and Chase, 2010;Strengers et al, 2010).…”

“…The observational studies use in situ climate data (Petchprayoon et al, 2010;Xiao et al, 2010), satellite measurements (Ge, 2010;Kishtawal et al, 2010) and data from regional reanalyses (Fall et al, 2010a(Fall et al, , 2010b. The modelling studies use regional atmospheric models (Moore et al, 2010;Sertel et al, 2010;Takahashi et al, 2010;Tokairin et al, 2010;Xiao et al, 2010), global climate models Costa and Pires, 2010;Kvalevåg et al, 2010;Lawrence and Chase, 2010;Strengers et al, 2010) and one uses a land surface model run offline (Mishra et al, 2010).…”

“…Kishtawal et al (2010) look at the evidence of urbanization on precipitation trends and the occurrence of extreme rainfall events over India. Petchprayoon et al (2010) search for evidence that increased runoff and flooding in the Yom River Basin of Thailand is connected to changes in land use, particularly the spread of urban areas. Sertel et al (2010) find evidence that inaccurate specification of land cover in the default configuration of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, and in particular, poor representation of the extent of urban areas, impairs the simulation of surface temperature as compared to station reports.…”

Impacts of climate and land use changes on river discharge in a small watershed: a case study of the Lam Chi subwatershed, northeast Thailand

“…Petchprayoon et al (2010) studied the hydrological impact of land use/land cover change in the Yom River watershed, in northern Thailand. They showed that the expansion of urban areas by 132% (from 210 km 2 in 1990 to 488 km 2 in 2006) resulted in a positive temporal trend in river discharge.…”

Impacts of land use change and climate variations on annual inflow into the Miyun Reservoir, Beijing, China

“…Many methods have been developed for isolating the effect of land use change from climate variations on regional hydrology. These methods include the paired catchment approach (Brown et al, 2005;Zégre et al, 2010), statistical methods (Costa et al, 2003;Sun et al, 2006;Petchprayoon et al, 2010), and a hydrological model (Haverkamp et al, 2005;Mao and Cherkauer, 2009;Baker and Miller, 2013). Raymond et al (2008) suggested that land use change and management have been more important than climate variation to increase riverine water export from the Mississippi River over the past 50 years.…”