Abstract
This work presents an automatic procedure to quantify dune dynamics on isolated barchan dunes exploiting Synthetic Aperture RADAR satellite data. We use C-band datasets, allowing the multi-temporal analysis of dune dynamics in two study areas, one located between the Western Sahara and Mauritania and the second one located in the South Rayan dune field in Egypt. Our method uses an adaptive parametric thresholding algorithm and common geospatial operations. A quantitative dune dynamics analysis is also performed. We have measured dune migration rates of 2–6 m/year in the NNW-SSE direction and 11–20 m/year NNE-SSW for the South Rayan and West-Sahara dune fields, respectively. To validate our results, we have manually tracked several dunes per study area using Google Earth imagery. Results from both automatic and manual approaches are consistent. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of the approach presented.
Highlights
An understanding of dune dynamics becomes critical in cases where dunes represent a real hazard due to their proximity to villages or agricultural fields and when dunes move towards them, as is the case for [1] and [2,3,4] respectively.In order to increase our understanding of this, the accumulation of windblown sand into sand dunes has been the subject of numerous studies using both traditional field surveys and remote sensing techniques
West Sahara-Mauritania We applied the aforementioned methodology to the West Sahara dataset, obtaining after our dune identification step the detected sand bodies for the different satellite acquisitions
We have developed a totally automatic approach to measure dune dynamics, and have applied it to different test sites where barchan dunes move freely, but at different speeds and in different directions, showing the robustness of our method
Summary
An understanding of dune dynamics becomes critical in cases where dunes represent a real hazard due to their proximity to villages or agricultural fields and when dunes move towards them, as is the case for [1] and [2,3,4] respectively.In order to increase our understanding of this, the accumulation of windblown sand into sand dunes has been the subject of numerous studies using both traditional field surveys and remote sensing techniques. Field surveys are expensive and have limited spatial coverage and revisits compared to satellite remote sensing techniques, which can cover very wide areas systematically, repetitively, and at a very low cost. Satellite RS has the advantage of being able to analyze less accessible dune regions and/or regions with extreme climatic conditions that may restrict field surveys. This even includes extraterrestrial dune systems, such as those on Mars [17] or in the equatorial regions of Titan [18,19,20,21,22,23]
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