Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Urbanization And Rainfall-Runoff Relationships In The Milwaukee River Basin, Woonsup Choi, Kathryn Nauth, Jinmu Choi, Stefan Becker

Geography Faculty Articles

To understand the changing rainfall-runoff relationship, the study examined climate and streamflow data in the Milwaukee River Basin in southeastern Wisconsin, of which four catchments with different degrees of urbanization were selected for analysis. This study analyzed temperature, precipitation, and streamflow data with a range of statistical methods, including the Mann-Kendall test, double-mass technique, and quantile regression. Runoff ratios and extreme flow indices were higher in more urbanized catchments. Catchments with long-term data (>40 years) showed significantly increasing runoff ratios and slopes in double mass curves. Overall, there are signs of changes in the rainfall-runoff relationship, but how much …

Effects Of Land Cover Change On Water Quality In Urban Streams At Two Spatial Scales, Sonia Singh, Heejun Chang

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

This study examines the relationships between land cover change and water quality change in three urbanizing watersheds in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States: Burnt Bridge Creek, Salmon Creek, and the Tualatin River. All three watersheds have had many of their water quality parameters exceeding Total Maximum Daily Loads as required by their state’s environmental agencies in the past decades. By using the National Land Cover Datasets classified by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for 1992, 2001 and 2006 and water quality data for a period between 1991 and 2010, this paper aims to examine whether changes …

Impacts Of Remotely Sensed Land Use Data On Watershed Hydrologic Change Assessment, Gi-Choul Ahn, Steven I. Gordon, Carolyn J. Merry

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Urbanization affects the stream system of a watershed. Increased urbanization alters the land cover and surface characteristics, the stream channel characteristics, and pollutant load of a stream system by increasing the amount of impervious surface. Once rural, forest, or wetland areas are changed to streets, highways, parking lots, sidewalks, and building rooftops. This results in large volumes of runoff being generated for an intense storm over a relatively short time period. As a result, sensitive ecosystems are likely to be damaged by increased urbanization.

Projecting the impact of land use changes on a watershed scale often requires the use of …