Assessing impervious area ratios of grid-based land-use classifications on the example of an urban watershed

ABSTRACT

When applying a distributed hydrological model in urban watersheds, grid-based land-use classification data with 10 m resolution are typically used in Japan. For urban hydrological models, the estimation of the impervious area ratio (IAR) of each land-use classification is a crucial factor for accurate runoff analysis. In order to assess the IAR accurately, we created a set of vector-based “urban landscape GIS delineation” data for a typical urban watershed in Tokyo. By superimposing the vector-based delineation map on the grid-based map, the IAR of each grid-based land-use classification was estimated, after calculating the IARs of all grid cells in the entire urban watershed. As a result, we were able to calculate the frequency distribution of IAR for each land-use classification, as well as the spatial distribution of IARs for the urban watershed. It is evident from the results that the reference values of IAR for the land-use classifications were estimated very roughly and inherited errors of between about 7% and 70%, which corresponds to more than 100 mm increase of direct runoff for the 1500 mm annual average precipitation.

Editor D. Koutsoyiannis; Guest editor E. Volpi