Contribution of urbanization and climate variability on surface water depletion across USA watersheds

Abstract

<p>Surface water resources are extremely vulnerable to climate variability and are seriously threatened by human activities. The depletion of surface water is expected to rapidly increase due to the combination of future climate change and world population growth projections. Under this scenario, the impacts of climate and human dynamics on surface water resources represent a global issue, requiring the definition of adequate management strategies that prevent water crisis and guarantee equitable access to freshwater resources. Remote sensing provides data that allow to monitor environmental change processes, such as changes in climatic conditions, land use, and spatial allocation of human settlements and activities. Although many products describing surface water dynamics and urban growth obtained from satellite imagery are available, an integrated analysis of such geospatial information has not been performed yet. Here, we explore the driving role of the variation in key climatic variables (e.g.,  precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture) and the extent of urban areas in the depletion of surface water across the watersheds in the United States by using data derived from remote sensing images and performing a correlation analysis. From our preliminary results, we observe that there is a positive correlation between surface water loss and the level of urbanization in each basin of our study area, meaning that surface water loss increases with the extent of urban area. On the contrary, we find that the correlation between surface water loss and precipitation has a counter-intuitive trend which needs to be further examined.</p>