HISTORICAL REMOTE SENSING OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER SYSTEM

The surficial processes research group at Southern Illinois University has been working on compiling a regional database of engineering modifications and channel changes during the past 100+ years on the Mississippi River system. Our study area includes the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico and the Lower Missouri River from Gavins Point Dam to the Missouri-Mississippi confluence. Along the > 4000 km that comprise these rivers, detailed maps and charts and quantitative measurements stretch back at least 100 years, and in some locations as much as 200 years or more. Use of these archival spatial data sets can be called “historical remote sensing” because they provides images and information about the river system that extend recent spatial imagery and hydrologic data far back in time.

The Mississippi River system database includes multiple generations of survey maps, navigation charts, historical air photographs, hydrographic surveys, engineering databases, and other archival sources. All data have been digitized, registered, rectified, and homogenized to common sets of vertical and horizontal datums. At present, specific engineering structures coded include 130 bridges, 54 dam structures (including lock-and-dams), 25 artificial meander cut-offs, 1093 levees together enclosing 9016 km2 of floodplain area, and 13,231 individual wing-dam segments with a cumulative length of 3137 km.

The principal purpose of this work is to construct an empirical statistical model to test for correlations between the history of engineering of the river system and changes in flood response documented by hydrologic analyses. More broadly, comparisons of changes in the river system through multiple time steps dramatically illustrate the dramatic magnitude and nature of the changes which these heavily utilized rivers have undergone during the past 1-2 centuries.