Application of hydromorphometric parameterization and ASTER DEM to characterize hydrological indicators in the Musandam
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Application of hydromorphometric parameterization and ASTER DEM to characterize hydrological indicators in the Musandam Peninsula, UAE and Oman Samy Ismail Elmahdy
Received: 25 February 2012 / Accepted: 20 November 2014 / Published online: 4 December 2014 # Società Italiana di Fotogrammetria e Topografia (SIFET) 2014
Abstract This paper investigates the use of hydromorphometric parameters and new maps and classification of landforms to characterize hydrological forms over the regional scale. This methodology was applied on a very large fractured carbonate aquifer located in the Musandam Peninsula, UAE and Oman. These hydrological forms are drainage basins, drainage network and flow accumulation, and transit and dissipation zones. These forms match in physical entities and are of real importance. Bivariate quadratic surfaces with moving window size of 3×3 were fitted to the DEM. The first derivative, slope steepness, and the second derivatives, minimum and maximum curvatures, were calculated as hydromorphometric parameters used to map and characterize hydrological forms at multiscale level. These, however, can be plotted into graphs of characterization and classification that comprise hydromorphometric signatures. The Landsat images, groundwater wells distribution, and spatial analysis of hydromorphometric parameter signatures allowed the assignment of the obtained results. The results revealed that this approach allowed a quick mapping and estimation of the spatial distribution of hydromorphometric parameters in a highly fractured karst regional aquifer. Keywords Oman . UAE . GIS . Drainage network . DEM . Remote sensing
Introduction In the last decade, the availability of high-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) has improved our ability to identify
S. I. Elmahdy (*) Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, United Arab Emirates University, 6 P.O. Box 17555, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates e-mail: [email protected]
and map the hydromorphology of a large-scale carbonate aquifer and promoted the development of automatic algorithms for the derivation, calculation, and classification of geomorphometric parameters of the Earth’s surface. Geomorphometry can be defined as a quantitative technique to analyze land surface features. In brief, it aims at extracting (land) surface parameters (morphometric, hydrological, etc.) and objects (watersheds, stream networks, landforms, etc.) using a set of numerical measures derived from DEMs such as slope steepness, profile curvature, plan convexity, cross-sectional curvature, and minimum and maximum curvatures (Wood 1996; Ehsani and Quil 2008). The derivation of landform units can be calculated using various approaches, including classification of morphometric parameters, cluster analysis, filter techniques, and multivariate statistics (Adediran et al. 2004). Profile curvature or vertical (kv) is parallel to the direction of the maximum slope. A negative value (0) indicates that the surface is upwardly concave in a cell. A value of zero indicates that the
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