Urbanisation Effect on Hydrological Response: A Case Study of Asan River Watershed, India

Abstract

Human being keeps on modifying the environment especially land use/land cover (LULC), in pursuance of excel, comfort and development. The subsequent impact of urbanization to the environment, especially land cover change, now occurs on scales that significantly affect hydrologic variations. The altering environment makes it necessary to understand and quantify various hydrological components for efficient water resource management. Therefore, in the present study, an attempt was  made to study the impact of LULC change on runoff generation potential. Asan River watershed, which lies in Dehradun, capital of newly created Uttarakhand State, India, is selected as study region. A huge industrialization is been taken place within this watershed immediately after declaration of state in year 2000. Initially, LULC change detection analysis was carried out by simple LULC class area difference between two years under consideration i.e. 2000 and 2010. The hydrological simulation using variable infiltration capacity macro-scale hydrological model depicted increase in runoff after urbanization took place.

Keywords: Land use land cover change, Urbanization, Impact assessment, hydrological modeling, variable infiltration capacity model, runoff potential