Remote sensing monitoring on coastline evolution in the Yellow River Delta since 1976

Abstract

The Yellow River is the river with the highest sediment contents of all rivers in the world. Several hundred million tons of sediment are transported to the coast and to the sea nearby annually, so the Yellow River Delta is in a continuous dynamic state due to interactions of river sediments and marine erosion. In this paper, the coastline evolution in the delta from 1976 to 2004 were studied using multi-temporal remote sensing images since the river course of the Yellow River was changed to Qing Shui Gou channel artificially in 1976. Trying to anatomize the spatio-temporal feature of coastline evolution, 21 sheets of Landsat images were used as the data source. The multi-temporal satellite images were rectificated precisely and registered each other, and all the images have the same coordinate system. A mean high water (MHW) model was developed for extracting coastlines, and the coastlines were extracted automatically from remote sensing images after supervised classification. The result shows that a new land of 323 km(2) was formed during the period of 1976 to 1999 in the present estuary by GIS overlay analysis, but a territory of 31 km(2) was eroded after 1999. Meanwhile, a territory of 153 km(2) was eroded in the Diaokou estuary area to the north of the Yellow River Delta from 1976 to 2004.