ASSESSMENT OF SURFACE WATER DYNAMICS USING MULTIPLE WATER INDICES AROUND ADAMA WOREDA, ETHIOPIA

Abstract. Rapid change of Adama wereda during the last three decades has posed a serious threat to the existence of ecological systems, specifically water bodies which play a crucial part in supporting life. Role of Satellite images in Remote Sensing could be more important in investigation, monitoring dynamically and planning of natural surface water resources. Landsat-5(TM) & Landsat 8 (OLI) has high spatial, temporal and multispectral resolution and therefore provides consistent and perfect data to detect changes in surface changes of water bodies. In this paper, a study was conducted to detect the changes in water body extent during the period of 1984, 2000 and 2017 using various water indices such as namely Water Ratio Index (WRI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), supervised classification and wetness component of K-T transformation and the results are Presented. NDWI has been adopted for this study as compared with other indices through ground survey. The results showed an intense decreasing trend in the lakes of chelekleka, kiroftu, lake 1 and lake 3 of surface area in the period 1984–2017, especially between 2000 and 2017 when the lake lost about 1.309 km² (one third) of its surface area compared to the year 2000, which is equivalent to 76%, 18%, 0.03% and 96%. Interestingly koka lake has shown very erratic changes in its area coverage by losing almost 3.5 km² between 1984 and 2000 and then climbing back up by 14.8 km² in 2017. Percentage of increment was observed that 10.6% as compared with previous year.