Browsing by Author "Gafurov, Abror"

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Open Access
Water balance modeling using remote sensing information : focus on Central Asia
(2010) Gafurov, Abror; Bárdossy, András (Prof. Dr.)
The whole Central Asian population is dependent on water resources stored as solid in high mountains and feed the population in summer. The agriculture in Central Asia is possible only by irrigating the land in regular basis. The water for it comes from snow and glacier melt in high mountains. Thus, it is important to estimate possible water stored in mountains during planting season to better plan agricultural activities in summer. As an example, the year of 2002 or 2007 were drought years with extreme shortages of water for iriigation purposes, but the agricultural activities were planned as usual. As a consequence, the agricultural yeild has reduced very much so that it had an e ffect on the economy of countries. Another essential aspect for the importance of water balance modeling in this region is ongoing large reservoir construction plans that should mainly serve as energy generator for Central Asian population. In order to carry out such large projects, detailed hydrological studies are very important that should help to define the location or the size of the reservoir to be constructed. Such activities will continue in the future as population is increasing and the demand for energy as well as for water will be increasing. For the reasons mentioned above, water balance modeling studies are very essential for Central Asia. These studies require data availability to be representative in quality and quantity. Data availability for such studies in this region is limited. It is limited also due to very heterogeneous topography of the region where environmental parameters have their spatial heterogeneity as well. Nowadays, remote sensing has become one of the very promising alternative data sources for such regions with limited data availbility. The advantages of remote sensing information is that this data is spatially distributed and it is based on true reflection of surface properties of each spatial scale which can be better than inter-or extrapolated data for modeling purposes. For these reasons, testing the possibility of applying remote sensing information for water balance studies in data limited regions such as Central Asia was a challenge to this study. The main objective of this research is to carry out water balance study for mountainous regions with data limited conditions using remote sensing information. This study will be focused on the use of mainly snow cover information from remote sensing that can be integrated for hydrological modeling studies. Additionally, possibility of air temperature estimation using remote sensing Land Surface Temperature (LST) will also be investigated. Available, but few station data will be used for the validation of remote sensing information. These two parameters are most important environmental parameters in Central Asia where snow and glacier melt according to available energy (temperature) dominates summer discharge in rivers. The main open question arising from the motivation for this study can be devided into two parts: - how can we compensate data gaps in data scarce regions in mountainous areas? - can remote sensing information be used in water balance modeling purposes in Central Asia?