Analysis of the Morphological Changes of the River Padma Along Naria Upazila through Supervised Classification of Satellite Images

This paper analyzes the morphological changes of the Padma River along Naria upazila, which was severely affected by river erosion in 2018, analyzing the satellite images of last 42 years. Five satellite imageries of 10-year interval were used. Various software such as Google Earth Pro, QGIS 3.8, Adobe Illustrator, etc. have been used for image processing. The land cover changes under four classes as water, built-up, vegetation and bare soil were identified using the method of Supervised Classification. Surface thermal emissivity was also detected and the impact of the changes in land cover to the surface temperature has been investigated. The results show that during the past 42 years, the rate of sedimentation has been increased significantly, river become braided in nature, average surface temperature decreased and intensive river training works performed at both sides. Some parts of the study areas have been found to be unaffected by erosion for long time too. Based on these information, probable causes of recent Naria erosion is discussed, however, further analysis is needed with bigger domain of Ganges catchment. The study is considered to be of great importance because of its close vicinity to the largest infrastructure of the country Padma bridge.