IDENTIFICATION AND MONITORING OF WATERLOGGED AREAS IN A PRODUCTIVE REGION OF ARGENTINA USING LANDSAT INFORMATION

CAPPELLETTI, L.; SCHRAPFFER, A.; SORENSSON, A.

METEOROLOGICA

CENTRO ARGENTINO DE METEORÓLOGOS

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2021

0325-187X

The monitoring of flooded and waterlogged areas is essential for the Argentinean Pampas, an extensive flat region of high agricultural, livestock and industrial productivity. Areas within the Argentinean Pampas have experienced a rise of the water table in recent years, a key factor contributing to the development and persistence of flooding. The monitoring of these extreme environmental events is essential for long-term objectives, e.g. increasing knowledge to model and predict the occurrence and evolution of extreme events; as well as for short-term objectives, e.g. to provide producers potential field management options in a flood emergency. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to develop a simple method for monitoring affected areas, using accessibletools. A 160 km² region of southeastern Córdoba for which data on water table height and daily precipitation are available, was chosen as a study site. To determine the flooded areas of the site, 18 Landsat-8/OLI images from September 2019 - April 2021 were used. On each of these images,pixels were labeled according to three categories: Open Water, Mixed-Water and Non-Water by applying unsupervised classification of the mNDWI and NDWI water indices. Despite the lack of scenes due to cloud cover the scenes may suffer, the Open Water category, and to a lower degree the Mixed-Water category, are able to capture the changes in the water table height due to precipitation.