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Urban development and flooding in Houston Texas, inferences from remote sensing data using neural network technique

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Environmental Geology

Abstract

The effects of urban development on the natural ecosystem and its link to the increased flooding in Houston, Texas were evaluated. Houston is suitable for this type of analysis due to its 1.95 million population, large geographic area and fast growth rate. Using neural network techniques, four Landsat Thematic Mapper images were grouped into five land use classes for the period 1984 to 2003: vegetation, bare ground, water, concrete and asphalt. Results show that asphalt and concrete increased 21% in the time period 1984–1994, 39% in 1994–2000 and 114%, from 2000 to 2003, while vegetation suffered an overall decrease. When change detection data are compared with runoff ratio data, a relationship between increased runoff and urban development is apparent, which indicates increased chances of flooding. Initial results of this work are made available to the public in GIS format via internet using Arc Internet Map Server (ArcIMS) at http://geoinfo.geosc.uh.edu/Houston.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by Environmental Institute of Houston. Some of the data was obtained from CSR, UT; Austin is thanked for providing Landsat dataset. Bibi Naz and Hongmei Cao are acknowledged for their help in image processing and ArcIMS web page development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX, 77204-5007, USA

    Shuhab D. Khan

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  1. Shuhab D. Khan
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Correspondence to Shuhab D. Khan.

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Khan, S.D. Urban development and flooding in Houston Texas, inferences from remote sensing data using neural network technique. Environ Geol 47, 1120–1127 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00254-005-1246-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00254-005-1246-x

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