Detecting shoreline changes in Chabahar Bay by processing satellite images

Abstract

Monitoring coastal areas is an important parameter in the sustainable development and protection of the environment. The expansion of constructions in Iran's southern coasts has not only led to the destruction of geomorphological landforms, but has also changed the process of erosion and sedimentation in coastal areas. Nowadays, remote sensing data are considered as the most efficient source of information for the study and interpretation of coastal landforms, tidal levels, changes in coastline, depth of water, and so forth. The purpose of this study is to investigate the changes in the coastline of Chabahar Gulf, located on the coasts of the Oman Sea by using remote sensing techniques. This study examined and interpreted qualitative and quantitative changes of the coastlines in a forty-two-year period. Different supervised classification methods were used from which the most accurate one was ultimately chosen. The classified images were divided into two classes of land and water, and the changes of these two classes between 1972 and 2014 were extracted. The net change results indicate that in the forty-two-year period, 1,832,436 m2 of the land has been added to water class, and 7,004,844 m2 of water has been added to land.