Assessment of Water Level in Dadin Kowa Dam Reservoir in Gombe State Nigeria Using Geospatial Techniques

Abstract

Reservoirs have been found to provide a convenient source of water for different purposes to rural communities and this makes them indispensable, and they are quite important in improvement of livelihoods of rural community. The study applied Geospatial techniques in assessing the Dadin Kowa Dam Water level in Gombe State, Nigeria. To achieve the objectives of this study, two major data were acquired. The water reservoir level recorded from 1987 till 2013 was collected from Upper Benue River Basin Development Authority also Landsat satellite imagery from 1987, 2000 and 2015 were acquired. Supervised image based classification was applied to assess the class of land use land cover in the area of study. The extents (surface areas) of the Dadin Kowa Dam were delineated from Landsat satellite images using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). the water level record was arranged in Microsoft Excel and the mean of the water level for 1987, 2000, and 2015 were used to assess the change both in extent and volume. The result shows that from 1987 to 2000 the water level increased and decreased from 2000 to 2015 due to the climate change condition and the high rate consummation of water due to population growth of the area from 266844 in 1991 to 367500 in 2016. Dadin Kowa reservoir may completely dry up by the year 2029 if the climatic condition remains as it is.