Study of Snow Cover Dynamics of Pinder Watershed in Central Himalaya using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

N. C. Pant, Manish Kumar, J. S. Rawat, Neha Rani

Abstract


This paper is an attempt to examine the dynamics of snow cover using Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) in Pinder Watershed, Central Himalaya, India. Landsat satellite imageries of three different time periods, i.e., Landsat TM of 1990, Landsat TM of 1999 and Landsat TM 2011 were used to quantify snow cover. The geographical distribution of snow cover reveals that in 1990 and 1999 about 9.40% (176.20 km2) and 8.60% (161.08 km2)area of the Pinder Watershed was under snow cover while in 2011 the snow cover was found 7.80% (147.50 km2).These data suggest that due to global warming about 28.7 km2 snow cover of Pinder Watershed has been converted into non-snow cover area at an average rate of 1.36 km²/year during the last two decades, i.e., in between 1990 to 2011.

Keywords


NDVI; Snow Cover Dynamics; Pinder Watershed; Central Himalaya; RS/GIS Application

Full Text: PDF

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Bookmark and Share


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

*2016 Journal Impact Factor was established by dividing the number of articles published in 2014 and 2015 with the number of times they are cited in 2016 based on Google Scholar, Google Search and the Microsoft Academic Search. If ‘A’ is the total number of articles published in 2014 and 2015, and ‘B’ is the number of times these articles were cited in indexed publications during 2016 then, journal impact factor = A/B. To know More: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor)