Impacts of impervious surfaces on runoff behavior, Santiago de Chile, 1973--2002: A watershed approach combining statistical methods, remote sensing, and geographic information systems.

摘要

This research concerns hazardous impacts of anthropogenic activities on natural systems. Urban floods illustrate this situation, and it is recognized that urbanization processes increase a city's physical exposure to urban floods. Previous research provides an array of approaches to measure the effects of urbanization on runoff behavior. However, many of these are dependent on availability of particular data sets. The challenge for this research is to accommodate these techniques to work with cost efficient and publicly available datasets that. To answer the research questions this study integrated three different analyses (with different methodologies and datasets) into a GIS platform. This provided a flexible environment for analyzing the impacts of urbanization on hydrologic processes. The results indicate that the 46% increase of impervious surface experienced by the Mapocho basin during 1973 and 2002 caused an increase of 31.3% in winter mean flows, 99.9% in peak flows and 58.3% in stream level.