Abstract
Abstract. Managing surface water and groundwater as a unified system is important for water resource exploitation and aquatic ecosystem conservation. The unified approach to water management needs accurate characterization of surface water and groundwater interactions. Temperature is a natural tracer for identifying surface water and groundwater interactions, and the use of remote sensing techniques facilitates basin-scale temperature measurement. This study focuses on the Heihe River basin, the second largest inland river basin in the arid and semi-arid northwest of China where surface water and groundwater undergoes dynamic exchanges. The spatially continuous river-surface temperature of the midstream section of the Heihe River was obtained by using an airborne pushbroom hyperspectral thermal sensor system. By using the hot spot analysis toolkit in the ArcGIS software, abnormally cold water zones were identified as indicators of the spatial pattern of groundwater discharge to the river.
Highlights
Though surface water and groundwater were often managed and studied separately in the past, many hydrologists have realized that surface water and groundwater are parts of a single and interconnected resource system (Winter et al, 1999)
According to previously published papers, the spatial location of the groundwater discharge was usually directly identified by visual interpretation of the remote sensing imagery (Fig. 2(a) and (b)) (Banks et al, 1996; Torgersen et al, 2001)
By using a hot spot analysis tool in ArcGIS, the spatial clustering pattern of the river surface temperature was obtained with the output field (z-score) identifying the spatial distribution pattern of the cold and hot abnormal areas under the assumptions mentioned above (Fig. 2(c))
Summary
Though surface water and groundwater were often managed and studied separately in the past, many hydrologists have realized that surface water and groundwater are parts of a single and interconnected resource system (Winter et al, 1999). Key words Heihe River Basin; airborne thermal infrared remote sensing; groundwater discharge; hot spot analysis
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