Dead Sea Water Level and Surface Area Monitoring Using Spatial Data Extraction from Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Satellite images provide important information on earth surface, geographic area, weather and natural phenomena. Analyzing the satellite images of the Dead Sea in Jordan can help determining the water level and surface area of the Dead Sea and its declining rate. This paper derives a various measurements from temporal medium-quality remote sensing images to calculate the surface area of the Dead Sea over the past 29 years. It shows the outcome of applying spatial data calculations on the Dead Sea images taken from Google Earth Engine. Our analysis approach is to extract the region of interest followed by performing spatial based calculations. Furthermore deriving several results according to an adapted mathematical model of the Dead Sea. The main findings are the calculated 60 km2 shrinkage and the 18 meters decline over the study period. Resulting in maximum of 1.8 meters in the water level change. In addition our findings show the atmospheric noise tolerance of each processing technique. We also present a case study showing our analysis.