A simple waterline approach for tidelands using multi-temporal satellite images: A case study in the Yangtze Delta

Waterline technique based on satellite remote sensing is potentially one of the most effective tools for studying changes in tidal flat environment and coastlines. However, multi-temporal waterlines obtained from satellite images are often difficult to compare directly because fluctuant tidal conditions may produce different elevation of waterlines. To overcome the difficulty, this study developed a comparable waterline solution to estimate active lateral evolutions using TM satellite images at different tide conditions. Owing to the dynamic properties, the Yangtze River mouth was selected as the case example to test the suitability of the approach, and totally four time slices were partitioned during 1987–2004 for investigating coastline changes. The first step of this technique is to digitize waterlines with various elevations labeling in a time slice. In the second step, the waterlines were merged to generate DEMs and contour maps using the linear gridding interpolation method. In the last step, any interested contour line may be extracted from DEMs and used for comparison of tideland changes. To evaluate the errors in digitizing and interpolation process, quantitative checks were examined after the DEMs were constructed. In order to monitoring the rate of coastline spread, a proposed approach for estimating mean coastline spread distance between two time spans is developed in this paper. To conclude, this work demonstrates the importance of TM/ETM images to provide high-frequency historical topography and morphodynamics information for coastal monitoring and evaluation.