Water is a strategic resource for both socio-economic development and human life. The current study has been carried out for spatio-temporal change detection of surface water bodies during winter period using hybrid modelling approach. The study area has fallen in the northern part of Bangladesh and is locally called Chalan Beel with 5 million of in habitants, a prominent intensive crop production, surface and groundwater irrigation, high evapotranspiration, and water scarcity. For the detection of water body changes, satellite images of 1999 and 2011 were used, and the following image fusion techniques were applied: (a) Gram-Schmidt (GS), (b) modified intensity hue saturation (IHS), (c) high-pass filter (HPF), and (d) wavelet. Landsat 7/ETM + panchromatic (PAN) band of 15 m × 15 m resolution in 1999 and Landsat 5/TM multispectral (MS) bands of 30 m × 30 m resolution in 2011 were allied each other to generate high-resolution image that contains information of two different years. The fused images were classified to extract the water bodies using four classification methods: (a) artificial neural network (ANN), (b) support vector machine (SVM) and (c) maximum likelihood (ML). To analyze the quality of the fused images, statistical calculation (quantitatively) and Laplacian edge detection (qualitatively) were used. To validate the fused image classification results, the multispectral images from 1999 and 2011 were again individually classified using principal component analysis (PCA), normalized difference water index (NDWI), and image differencing (ID) processes and compared with the previous classification. Surprisingly, the results showed that two-third of the areas dried up in 10 years. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.