Abstract:
In this study, the impact of the change in temperature on the snow cover area of both the Brahmaputra and Subansiri River basins has been analyzed from 2002 to 2015 for the months of January, April, July and October using MODIS data of 500m resolution and HadCM3 GCM temperature data of A2 scenario. The method adopted was Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) Method. It has been found that except for the month of January, the snow cover area showed decreasing trends with respect to the increasing trends of temperature for the other months. The study on the effect of change in snow cover area on the discharges of the river Brahmaputra and Subansiri revealed that w.r.t. the decreasing trends of snow cover area, the discharge showed increasing trends. A study has been carried out to analyze the change in land use/land cover in both the basins from 2002 to 2012 for January, April and October using supervised classification method and maximum likelihood classifier algorithm. It has been found that dense vegetation and snow cover area decreased during this period, while light vegetation and bare soil showed significant increase.
