Assessment of sedimentation in kharkhara reservoir using digital image processing techniques

Dams or reservoirs have proven to be very beneficial for the sustained development of human beings since its evolution. The usefulness of dam depends upon its capacity to store water. Sedimentation is a process which involves deposition of silt carried by flowing water from erosion of soil of upstream catchment area. Sedimentation has proven to be very detrimental for the capacity of dams or reservoirs. Sedimentation results in huge loss of storage capacity of dams or reservoirs thus reducing its life. Many methods have developed to measure the reservoir sedimentation like hydrographic survey, inflow-outflow approaches, remote sensing method etc. Out of these, remote sensing method is widely used as it is very simple and involves very less human survey thus reducing the chances of error. In remote sensing method, revised water spread area at different levels of reservoir is calculated and used for computation of loss of capacities between these levels. The present study has been carried out on Kharkhara reservoirs situated in Chhattisgarh state. Multi–date satellite data of IRS-P6, LISS-III is used for Kharkhara dam to estimate revised capacity. The normalized difference water index (NDWI), band ratioing technique (BRT) and false color composite (FCC) along with field truth verification were used to differentiate water pixels from rest of image. As the revised water spread at dead storage and full reservoir levels were not available, best –fit curve has been used to get revised spreads on these levels. From the analysis, it has been observed that Kharkhara reservoir has lost 8.41 MCM of gross storage against its total capacity of 169.54 MCM during 50 years(1967-2017). The average rate of sedimentation in Kharkhara reservoir is 16.82 Ha-m per year.