REGIONAL WATER SECURITY, CONTEMPORARY FARM LANDUSE TREND, AND GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACT IN NORTHERN ALABAMA

Huntsville City is experiencing a high rate of urban sprawl and expansion. The land use/land cover across the Madison and Limestone Counties is being rapidly transformed from a predominantly cotton‐farm or pastoral‐land to a new urban, suburban one. The completely new ramifying conditions for surface water flow and groundwater recharging are part of the permanent transformations induced by such rapid dynamics. This process combined with global climate change is posing a challenge to secure sufficient water resource for a healthy eco‐system and balanced regional economic growth. The recent past recurrent agricultural drought had shown the vulnerability of North Alabama’s water system to induced weather‐regime fluctuation and change. In this poster we analyze four coupled Landsat TM images and weather observations at five different stations across the region, between the years 1983-2008. Historical trends of water supply, rain-fall, and temperature distribution over the past three decades is discussed and future research direction presented.