28. Geospatial Applications in Water Resource Management with Special Reference to Climate Change

Global climate change has stressed the water availability scenario across the globe. As far as India is concerned, still about 60% of agriculture is rainfed, and global climate change has huge impact on its sustainability. Accurate information on the probable changes in monsoon patterns and availability of water resource is a must for sustainable rainfed agriculture. Proper monitoring and timely anticipation of spatial impacts also assume greater importance in water resource management. Drastic changes in the global environment have compelled us to increase the awareness amongst masses, especially related to and affected by water availability to convert our efforts into higher rate of success. Environmental management could be achieved only through monitoring of the changes in environment and making everybody aware of it. Geoinformatics is the potential technology for generating baseline data for monitoring of environmental parameters pertaining to several environmental changes. Remote sensing technology with various satellites collecting information from the space at different spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions is being widely used for extracting information related to many baseline parameters like vegetation, crops, forests, water resources, urban changes, rain water harvesting, etc. Geographic information system (GIS) has the capability to generate spatial digital data for projecting the parametric information at various levels of environmental monitoring. There is need to exploit the full potential of geoinformatics for timely monitoring and management of the water resources. In today’s changing global climate, visualization of water resource parameters and management of water resources could be effectively achieved through application of geoinformatics. The chapter discusses applications of geoinformatics in various aspects of water resources monitoring, especially with reference to climate change.