HR: 0800h
AN: H11F-0360    [Abstracts]
TI: Impervious Surface Assessment of the Towne Creek Watershed, Etowah County, Alabama
AU: * Steffy, D A
EM: dsteffy@jsu.edu
AU: Blalock, C
EM: yertman@fastmail.fm
AB: A Geographic Information System (GIS) based approach was used to do a preliminary assessment of a watershed's vulnerability and has been proven to be a quick, inexpensive, and effective means to provide guidance to the watershed manager. This GIS-based approach was used in an assessment of a watershed's proportion of impervious surface as a quantifiable measurement its vulnerability. The percent of a watershed area that is impervious was determined by utilizing the Impervious Surface Analysis Tool (ISAT), which is an extension of the ArcGIS program. ISAT uses landuse/landcover, watershed boundary, and population density data sets to calculate the percent impervious surface (%IS). The Towne Creek watershed covers 24,730 acres in southern Etowah County, Alabama, was investigated. The watershed, which empties into the Middle Coosa River, includes the suburbs of the City of Gadsden. The watershed was delineated into 75 catchments ranging from 230 to 3,163 acres. Initial assessment of the watershed estimated 10.5% of the area is impervious. Individual catchments within the watershed were then classified as being degraded ($>$25 %IS), impaired (10 to 25 %IS) or protected ($<$10 %IS). According to this classification scheme, 5 catchments covering 2.6% of the watershed is classified as being degraded, and 5 catchments covering 3.6% of the watershed is impaired, and the remaining 65 catchments covering 93.8% of the watershed is protected.
DE: 1800 HYDROLOGY
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting