Estimation of Small Reservoir Storage Capacities with Remote Sensing in the Brazilian Savannah Region

Small reservoirs play an important role in supporting the local economy in the savannah areas of Brazil and are primarily used for the provision of water for irrigation and watering livestock. Hundreds of small reservoirs have been built in the last few decades in the Preto River Basin, but efficien...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Water resources management 2012-03, Vol.26 (4), p.873-882
Main Authors: Rodrigues, Lineu N., Sano, Edson E., Steenhuis, Tammo S., Passo, Denílson P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural production
Atmospheric Sciences
Basins
Brazil
Civil Engineering
Dams
Dry season
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Environment
Farmers
Freshwater
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hydrogeology
Hydrology/Water Resources
Irrigation
Irrigation water
Landsat
Livestock
Local economy
Methods
Remote sensing
Reservoir storage
Reservoirs
River basins
Rivers
Runoff
Savannahs
Seasons
Spatial distribution
Storage capacity
Studies
Surface area
Water management
Water resources
Water resources management
Water shortages
Water storage
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Summary:Small reservoirs play an important role in supporting the local economy in the savannah areas of Brazil and are primarily used for the provision of water for irrigation and watering livestock. Hundreds of small reservoirs have been built in the last few decades in the Preto River Basin, but efficient water management and sound planning are hindered by inadequate knowledge of the number, storage capacity and spatial distribution of reservoirs in the basin. The main reason for the lack of this information is that current methodologies for quantifying the physical parameters of reservoirs are laborious, time consuming and costly. To address this lack of data, a simple method to estimate reservoir storage volumes based on remotely sensed reservoir surface area measured with LANDSAT was developed. The method was validated with a subset of reservoirs in the Preto River Basin for which surface areas, shapes and depths were determined with ground-based survey measurements. The agreement between measured and the remotely sensed reservoir volumes was satisfactory, indicating that remotely-sensed images can be used for improved management of water in the Brazilian Savannah region. With the newly developed methods we found that the Preto River Basin’s 147 small reservoirs can store 19 × 10 6  m 3 of water at full capacity.
ISSN:0920-4741
1573-1650
DOI:10.1007/s11269-011-9941-8