Detecting Coastline Change with All Available Landsat Data over 1986–2015: A Case Study for the State of Texas, USA

Abstract

Coastline change often results from social and natural factors, such as human activities in the coastal zone, long-term and short-term sea level change, hurricane occurrences, subsequent recovery, and so on. Tracking coastline change is essential to deepen our understanding of coastal responses to these factors. Such information is also required for land use planning and sustainable development of coastal zones. In this context, we aimed to collect all available Landsat data (TM: Thematic Mapper, ETM+: Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus and OLI: Operational Land Imager) over 1986-2015 for tracking the coastline dynamic and estimating its change rate in the State of Texas, USA. First, the land vs. water maps at an annual scale were derived from the satellite images. The border between land and water represents the coastline in this study. Second, the annual land area was obtained to characterize the coastline dynamic and a linear regression model was used for estimating the change rate. We also analyzed the potential driving factors of the observed coastline change. The results reveal that the coastline in the State of Texas changed at a rate of −0.154 ± 0.063 km 2 /year from 1986 to 2015, which indicates that the coastline has mainly experienced an erosion over the past three decades. Specifically, 52.58% of the entire coastline retreated to the land while a 47.42% portion advanced to the ocean. Long-term sea level rise can result in the erosion of coastline. Hurricane occurrences can explain the relatively strong coastline erosion. Besides, significant difference between the coastline change rate with a higher curvature and a lower curvature was observed. This study establishes a general method for detecting coastline change at large spatial and long-term temporal scales, by using remote sensing that can give fundamental information on coastline change. This is important for making scientific and reasonable policies of sustainable development of coastal zones.

A New Adaptive Image Interpolation Method to Define the Shoreline at Sub-Pixel Level

“…The method described in this work start from a rough shoreline at the pixel level for each of the Landsat scenes that defines the set of initial pixels where the analysis starts. Note that this initial line can be obtained in various ways such as the thresholds implemented in [20,[49][50][51]. Any other accessible line can also be used (such as the shoreline provided by the Instituto Hidrográfico de la Marina for the Spanish territory) but usually these are biased in a magnitude about one Landsat pixel (25-35 m).…”

Three Decades of Coastal Changes in Sindh, Pakistan (1989–2018): A Geospatial Assessment

“…We selected only cloud-free and atmospherically corrected 30-m Landsat (TM: Thematic Mapper and OLI: Operational Image Processor) images acquired in non-flooding pre-monsoon season (Dec-April) to evaluate the geomorphological change of the coastline [27,35]. All the Landsat CDR (climate data records) images were pre-processed to L1T level (i.e., after standard terrain correction) with consistent geo-registration and within the prescribed tolerances (i.e., 12 m root-mean-square error) [11]. Due to the data availability and tidal level constraint (≤2.8 m), only some of the cloud-free images were suitable.…”

Coastline Zone Extraction Using Landsat-8 Oli Imagery, Case Study: Bodrum Peninsula, Turkey

“…The coastline which has a dynamic nature refers to the most important line features on earth's surface (Alesheikh et al, 2007;Winarso et al, 2001). Monitoring coastline changes in time is essential to provide fundamental information about the situation that the environment in; due to this reason it is necessary to monitor the coastline dynamics with large spatial scales and for long time periods (Xu, 2018;Lui et al, 2017;Papakonstantinou et al, 2016). Calibrating and verifying numerical models (Kraus, 1988), assessment of sea level rise (Leatherman, 2001), identification of legal property boundaries (Morton and Speed, 1998) and coastal survey-monitoring (Smith and Jackson, 1992) are examples of coastline investigations conducted (Boak and Turner, 2005).…”