Abstract:
Detection of changes in Earth surface features, for example lakes, is important for
understanding the relationships between human and natural phenomena in order to manage
better the increasingly scarce natural resources. This work presents a procedure of using
Modified Normalised Difference Water Index (MNDWI) to detect fluctuations of Lake
surface-water area and relate it to a changing climate. The study used radiometrically and
geometrically rectified Landsat images for 1986, 1995 and 2010 encompassing the Kyoga
Basin lakes of Uganda, in order to investigate the changes in surface-water area between the
respective years. The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) and Drought Severity Index (DSI)
are applied to show the relationship between variability of surface-water area and climate
parameters. The present analysis reveals that surface-water area fluctuation is linked to
rainfall variability. In particular, Lake Kyoga sub-basin lakes experienced an increase in
surface-water area in 2010 compared to 1986. This work has important implications to water
resources management for Lake Kyoga and could be vital to water resource managers across
Ugandan lakes.
