Abstract
Driven by erodible soil, hydrological stresses, land use/land cover (LULC) changes, and meteorological parameters, windblown dust events initiated from Lordsburg Playa, New Mexico, United States, threaten public safety and health through low visibility and exposure to dust emissions. Combining optical and radar satellite imagery products can provide invaluable benefits in characterizing surface properties of desert playas—a potent landform for wind erosion. The optical images provide a long-term data record, while radar images can observe land surface irrespective of clouds, darkness, and precipitation. As a home for optical and radar imagery, powerful algorithms, cloud computing infrastructure, and application programming interface applications, Google Earth Engine (GEE) is an invaluable resource facilitating acquisition, processing, and analysis. In this study, the fractional abundance of soil, vegetation, and water endmembers were determined from pixel mixtures using the linear spectral unmixing model in GEE for Lordsburg Playa. For this approach, Landsat 5 and 8 images at 30 m spatial resolution and Sentinel-2 images at 10–20 m spatial resolution were used. Employing the Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) techniques, the playa’s land surface changes and possible sinks for sediment loading from the surrounding catchment area were identified. In this data recipe, a pair of Sentinel-1 images bracketing a monsoon day with high rainfall and a pair of images representing spring (dry, windy) and monsoon seasons were used. The combination of optical and radar images significantly improved the effort to identify long-term changes in the playa and locations within the playa susceptible to hydrological stresses and LULC changes. The linear spectral unmixing algorithm addressed the limitation of Landsat and Sentinel-2 images related to their moderate spatial resolutions. The application of GEE facilitated the study by minimizing the time required for acquisition, processing, and analysis of images, and storage required for the big satellite data.
Highlights
Using the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images from Sentinel-1B satellite, we investigated the deformation and displacement of the Lordsburg Playa surface
This study identified the locations within the playa exposed to long-term hydrological and LULC changes, which are critical parameters that determine the sediment supply for wind erosion
The spectral unmixing approach detected numerous small, shallow water bodies, including those alongside major transportation systems which are difficult to detect with traditional spectral indices due to their coarser spatial resolution
Summary
Playas are one of the major sources of atmospheric dust [1,2,3,4,5], attributed to the availability of thick deposits of erodible clastic and chemical sediments [1], often inherited from wetter conditions during the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs [6], and unvegetated land cover type [4,7,8] They are generally dry lake beds in internal draining basins, common in arid and semi-arid environments where evaporation exceeds precipitation and inflow [9,10]. Bodele Depression, part of a dry lake bed at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, is the world’s greatest source of mineral dust, contributing between 6 and 18% to the global
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