Predicting future changes in climate and its impact on change in land use: a case study of Cauvery Basin

Abstract

The study involves the climate change prediction and its effects over a local sub grid scale of smaller area in Cauvery basin. The consequences of global warming due to anthropogenic activities are reflected in global as well as regional climate in terms of changes in key climatic variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity and wind speed. The key objectives of the study are to define statistical relationships between different climate parameters, to estimate the sensitivities of climate variables to future climate scenarios by integrating with GIS and to predict the land use/ land cover change under the climate change scenarios. The historical data set was analyzed to predict the climate change and its impact on land use/land cover (LULC) is observed by correlating the Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) values for two different times for the same area. It is so evident that due to the rise in temperature there is a considerable change in the land use affecting the vegetation index; increased temperature results in very low NDVI values or vegetation abundance.