Using Google Earth Engine development environment for remote sensing image analysis, Al Shuwija marsh case study

Abstract

As a result of climate change, including changing the timing of rainfall and the fluctuation of its quantities, in addition to changing the timing of snowmelt, and thus the variation in the amounts of torrents led to a clear change in the areas of flooded and humid lands, especially in the eastern side of Iraq bordering the Islamic Republic of Iran. This study aims to determine the maximum and minimum submerged area of Al Shuwija marsh basin using Landsat imagery (1984-2019) and provides statistical data on their scale to support planning and studies in this extent. Global Surface Water web application was called into Google earth engine (GEE) platform which used Landsat 5, 7 and 8 imageries to distinguish water and other feature through the spectral reflectance characteristics of different features through thermal band. Near-infrared and shortwave-infrared have been used to isolate pixels procured over vast water from those gained over different surfaces. And then create a chart that summarizes the area of surface water in this basin. Then the GEE conversion function used to convert raster to vector as a step before export result as a vector data which ease to use for calculating area of water classes. So briefly, the result is spatial data (polygon features) of water classes for study area in Keyhole Markup Language (kml) or ESRI Shapefile formats can be downloading from user account at google cloud.