International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—The morphometric characterization of river watersheds is of great importance and is used to predict extreme hydro-meteorological phenomena (floods). The aim of this work was to morphometrically characterize the Lucite River subwatershed using geotechnologies. Based on the Digital Elevation Model, using SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data, the following watershed morphometrics were determined: Drainage area, Watershed perimeter, Coefficient of compactness, Form factor, Circularity index, Declivity, Altitude, Maintenance coefficient, Drainage density, Hydrographic density, Torrential coefficient and Watershed order. All procedures were processed in ArcGIS 10.5 software. The results suggest that the Lucite River sub-watershed is not very susceptible to flooding under normal rainfall conditions, due to the low values of Drainage Density 0.021, Hydrological Density 0.028, Compactness Coefficient 1.92 and Form factor 0.43, presenting an elongated and irregular shape. Although these values do not indicate the need for flood prevention strategies, however in situations of abnormal rainfall, the sub-watershed could be susceptible to flooding, as some values are close to the threshold.

Keywords—watershed, morphometric characterization, geoprocessing

[PDF]

Cite: Eufrásio João Sozinho Nhongo, Isidro Alexandre Simão, Baptista João Boanha, and Castigo David Augusto Machava, "Geotechnology Applied to Morphometric Characterization of the Lucite River Sub-Watershed, Mozambique," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 304-309, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).