Impact of urbanization on hydrological responses: a case study in Dongguan City in the Pearl River Delta Area

Abstract:

China has observed rapid urbanization in the past decades, and the cities in the Pearl River Delta Area have experienced the rapidest urbanization, which caused fundamental impact on the hydrological responses. This paper studies this impact of Dongguan City, a typical city in the Pearl River Delta Area. Historic remote sensing imagery (acquired in 1979, 1989, 2000, 2006 and 2013) were first processed by using the support vector machines (SVM) method to extract the LULC data and impervious surface fraction data, and the urbanization pattern of Dongguan City is analysis. Then, a distributed hydrological model, the Liuxihe model is employed to simulated the hydrological processes of Hanxihe catchment in Dongguan City in 1979, 1989, 2000, 2006 and 2013 respectively, and the impact of change in impervious surface cover on the flood was assessed. The results show that the urbanized area in Dongguan City has increased more than 52% from 1979 to 2013 and the peak flow has increased more than two times from 1979 to 2013.