An Automated Procedure to Assist Site Selection of Water Harvesting Structures

A novel procedure is presented for identifying water harvesting sites and their potential storage capacities from spatial data of water scarce regions. Via analysis of Digital Terrain Models, the procedure identifies appropriate sites, applies barriers (representing dams etc.) and combines these with topographic contours to create polygons representing areas impounded by the barriers. These polygons are then intersected with elevation data to obtain the potential storage volume created by each barrier. Vegetation cover within each polygon is also extracted, from spectral-based rasters. This improves on existing water harvesting site selection techniques which consider parameters (e.g. slope) on a cell-by- cell basis.