Impact of snow avalanche on vegetation area using remote sensing data

Abstract

This work studies on the impact of avalanche on vegetation. For this study the data used was Thermal Infrared scanner Landsat Thematic Mapper and Operational Land Imager sensor. The collected data is of summer months with acquisition dates 16 September 2009 and 11 September 2013. Cloud free data were collected. The study area is situated near Badrinath region, Alaknanda basin, Himalayas. For this study five avalanche paths were detected, shed 1, shed 2, shed 3, shed 4 and shed 5. Both NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) and Tasseled Cap Transformation greenness method were applied in order to examine the amount of change in the vegetation due to occurrence of avalanche. The area was also classified into vegetation using the supervised based classification method, to determine the amount of change in the vegetation area. For computing the Tasseled Cap Transformation greenness, Raster calculator in ARC GIS 10.2 Software was used. Supervised based classification was done using Erdas IMAGINE 2013 software. © 2016 ACM.