Assessment of sand dunes movements rate in Atlantic Sahara desert using multi-temporal landsat imagery and GIS technique

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to determine the movement rate of barchans dunes in Atlantic Sahara desert (SW of Morocco) using remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. Tow Panchromatic Landsat band (15 m of resolution) covering the study area for one year were be used to get up this subject. Firstly, both bands were being processed in term of geometric and radiometric corrections. The automated extraction of dunes shape using co-occurrence measurement is the second step of this work. After extraction, a classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is the next step. A vectorization of classified dunes is final step which be necessary to export it in GIS platform to assess the movement rate. The results show that the annual movement rate dune varying from 15 m to 90 m according to the dunes size.