clustering

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The Chindwin River is located between Latitude 2206-2600 North and Longitude 95940818-9542 East and covers a catchment area of 113,4800 km2 across the northwestern region of Myanmar (Fig. 1). With a length of 985 km, it is the third largest river and one of the principal water resources in the country. It is the largest tributary of the well-known Ayeyarwaddy River, which is one of the principal rivers in Asia. The Chindwin basin is economically and ecologically important for the development of the country as a whole. With its tributaries, the Chindwin is a major transport artery, and it also connects the basin with the main economically developed areas of the country. In the Chindwin catchment, there are key biodiversity areas such as the Hukaung Valley and the Htamanthi wildlife sanctuaries, as well as major conservation areas such as the Upper Chindwin Catchment Corridor and the Lower Chindwin Forest Corridor which are endowed with an important population of critically endangered animals (NCEA 2009).
With an inadequate density of 20,000 km2 per station, the Chindwin River is experiencing frequent flood hazards, the challenging natural factor relating to its important role in national social-economy. According to the Department of Meteorology and Hydrology, Myanmar, since 1965 flood occurrences in the Chindwin basin are the highest in July and August, contributing 72% of the total number of floods in the basin. Severe floods hit the Chindwin basin every year at one place or another due to high rainfall intensities during the southwest monsoon. Recent flood disasters are threatening property, assets, human lives and ecological biodiversity in the region. Although the stream flows of other tributaries across the entire ca...

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... basin area layers.
As a major contributing factor in flood generating, the rainfall isohyetal map was prepared by using rainfall data at 34 locations; 11 of these are observed stations in the catchment with a daily record of 46 years (1965-2011). Mean annual rainfall data for the remaining stations were available from the WorldClim-Global Climate Data (http://www.worldclim.org). An ordinary Kriging method with GIS was applied to produce the mean annual rainfall. A geostatistical method, Kriging uses weights from surrounding measured values for predicting values at unmeasured locations. The Kriging estimation is expressed as follows:
F = ∑_(i=1)^n▒W_i f_i (2)
Where F is the prediction of the continuous variable of interest (f), n the number of scatter points, fi the observed value at the point i, and W is the weighting coefficient to each scattered point.

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