A study on the geomorphological change in tidal-flat using multisource remotely sensed data: a case study in the Gomso Bay, Korea

Detection and measurement of terrain and surface sediment distribution changes for tidal flats are important to make an integrated coastal area management plan. The use of satellite imagery gives the advantages of being able to detect two-dimensional coastline and geomorphologic structures over large areas. The MSP-RoA (maximum strength edge pruning ratio of average) method has been tested on Landsat TM band 4 to extract coastline of sea-tidal flat-land and to detect geomorphological structures. The difficulties in SAR application to the coastal region are associated with the nature of the signal return from the sea and land. However, coherence information can be exploited to determine the land/sea boundary since the sea is highly nonstationary as opposed to the land. The authors can generate coarse intertidal DEMs using a coastline extraction method for multisource and multi-temporal remotely sensed data. The objective of this study is to detect coastline and geomorphological structures using MSP-RoA edge detector and to generate intertidal DEMs using coastline extracted from optical and microwave remotely sensed data at short period. Geomorphological structures and DEMs extracted from the coastline are also compared to types of sediments and leveling data derived from in situ measurements.