IAPRS & SIS, Vol.34, Part 7, "Resource and Environmental Monitoring", Hyderabad, India,2002 
ANALYSING SENSITIVITY OF DRY SUSCEPTIBLE LAND USING REMO 1E SENSING 
AND GIS 
R Jana*, M V Khire 
Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, 
Powai, Mumbai-400 076, India- rina@csre.iitb.ac.in 
KEY WORDS: Climate, Land, Remote Sensing, Temporal Change Detection (Tendency), Variability, Vegetation 
ABSTRACT 
Both climate variability and human activity have a feedback role, which affects the prolific characteristics of land. This multifaceted 
behaviour is more sensitive over a susceptible land causing degradation of land’s capability and productivity. It is attempted to 
quantify the tendency of the land and it’s partial relationship with climate variability and population pressure at local level. 
In this study the land characteristics, viz., change in land use/land cover, tendency of land’s instability and change in albedo and 
Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) are assessed and thematic map are generated spatially. The land instability 
evaluates the uncertainty in land’s behaviour. The decrease of albedo in dry land gauges the improvement of land quality whereas 
it’s increase indicates degeneration of land quality. The NDVI is proved to be the most useful to evaluate the vegetation cover over 
the land. On the other hand the temporal climate feature is parametrised through it’s statistical variables. The human population 
pressure is represented assuming compound population growth rate. The rational study has been carried out considering triangular 
relationship among climate variation, human population pressure and tendency of land entity. The effort has been given to 
understand difficulty and simplicity of parametric interdependency through physical analysis. The results evaluate the comparative 
sensitivity within the similar susceptible land play a significant role. The study is carried out using two sets of IRS 1A/IB LISS-I 
data of same month with about decadal separation. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Both climate variability and human activity have a feedback 
role, which affects the prolific characteristics of land. The 
global climate change usually exacerbates the regional climate 
variability which has a significant role in the local 
environmental processes. The preliminary results indicate that 
the mean ambient temperature during last half-a-century in and 
around the study area has been increased by 0.07-0.81°C 
climatically. Though the accumulated precipitation is increased 
in recent climatic period the vulnerability has been increased in 
many stations and it has been observed in coefficient of 
variation of precipitation (CV%). Human fallibility and 
resource exploitation are most sensitive parameters in the 
country like India. It has speeded up the land degradation 
process. This multifaceted behaviour is more sensitive over a 
susceptible land causing degradation of land’s capability and 
productivity. It affects the land reflectance or albedo specially 
in arid or semi arid land. Hence, in arid or semiarid land the 
reflectance of land surface indicates the land characteristic. In 
radiative transfer processes the increase in surface albedo 
usually implies that the land is leading towards dryness (Wahab 
and Hasanean, 1999). 
Robinove et al (1981) described a methodology based on 
Landsat Albedo of earth surface in the wavelength range of 
0.5um-1.1pm as collected by LANDSAT. Albedo is calculated 
using digital brightness, solar irradiance, sun elevation angle, 
atmospheric correction. They demonstrated the use of 
increment in albedo as an indicator of degradation of land 
quality whereas decrease indicate the improvement of the land 
quality in arid zone. Pickup and Chewings (1988) developed a 
model for forecasting large scale patterns of soil erosion and 
deposition from landsat MSS data in arid grazing lands. 
The NDVI, indicator of vegetation growth is sensitive to 
variation of rainfall (Davenport et al, 1993) or available 
irrigated water. Ghosh(1993) gave the revelation towards 
development of several indicators for monitoring of land 
589 
degradation and a solution using RS-GIS tools and ancillary 
data. 
In view of these observations it is attempted to quantify the 
tendency of land’s behaviour and it’s partial relationship with 
climate variability and population pressure at local level. 
2. PURPOSE OF THE STUDY 
The objectives of this study are : 
e evaluation of indicators representing land, climate and human 
» Relationship among land stress, climate variability and human 
pressure 
3. DATA AND STUDY AREA 
It is attempted to configure the simplest approach of envisaged 
technique using two sets of spatial as well as temporal data. 
The study is carried out using two sets of IRS 1A/1B LISS-I 
data of same month with about decadal separation. It is 
attempted to select closest available Julian day for remote 
sensing data assuming that such set of temporal data carry least 
atmospheric discrepancy in clear sky condition with seasonal 
consistency of land's behaviour (table-1). The decadal time 
interval between two sets of data is assumed to carry both 
climatic and the human stress over the land unit. The climatic 
data is procured from India Meteorological Department (IMD) 
and the census data is acquired from district level information 
centers and web resources. 
There are two study zones, Chikalthana and Parbhani (Figure!) 
covering two important agricultural belts in semiarid zones of 
Western India. In this study, Chikalthana is approximately 
bounded by 19°41'N and 20°2'N latitudes, 75°13 E and 75°32E 
longitudes. The Parbhani is bounded by 19°12'N and 19°48 N 
latitudes, 76°34E and 77°2'E longitudes. The study area of 
Chikalthana and Parbhani cover 977.74 Km? and 2468.28 Km?