SAR monitoring of coastline change in Shanghai, China

Abstract

In this paper, we extract the waterline from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to illustrate coastline change in Shanghai, China. Nine ERS-2 and ENVISAT SAR images acquired between 1998 and 2006 were selected and a new land-water classification scheme was implemented to obtain coastline. The results show that the seaward coastline change between 1998 and 2000 is faster in the eastern part and slower in the western part in the study area. Later, between 2000 and 2005, coastline changes faster in both eastern and western sides. Coastline remained virtually unchanged between 2005 and 2006.