Monitoring of Incomati River Basin with Remote Sensing

Abstract: Incomati river basin is located in the continent of South Africa and is shared between three countries of Republic of Mozambique, Republic of South Africa, and the Kingdom of Swaziland. Located in a water-stressed region and shared between three countries it has importance in both sociopolitical and water scarcity aspect. The three countries recently (in 2002) signed an agreement for letting certain amount of water pass through the borders. Accordingly all 3 countries need to implement a monitoring method to evaluate the agreement. This thesis deals with different remote sensing methods for monitoring of water resources in the basin. To do this, after explaining site conditions, different literature has been reviewed and three main remote sensing methods (Optical method, Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery (SAR), Radar Altimetry) are explained briefly. Their advantages and disadvantages and their limitations are discussed. By creating an inventory of available satellites and considering the site specific conditions the use and applicability of those methods to the region are discussed. This paper shows that among the three major Remote Sensing methods, optical method and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can be used for monitoring of the Incomati basin. Furthermore, the optical method was applied to assess water storage in the region. Some free Landsat images of the region obtained from Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF), www.landcover.org have been analyzed and water storage has been estimated and the results compared with ground truth information. The results obtained from 6 Landsat images showed high accuracy of water storage estimation with an average accuracy of 3.5%.