Search

The study of the foreshore is of considerable interest to the environmental science community, and the advent of regular SAR imagery from the ERS, Radarsat and JERS satellites has offered the opportunity to monitor continuously this dynamic region. Knowledge of foreshore topography is of use in improving flood prediction models, measuring sediment flux, and assessing the effectiveness of sea defences. Conventional surveying is the expensive, time consuming and often hazardous current technique often employed to obtain these data. The alternative technique presented here involves a semi-automatic process to delineate the shoreline on a number of ERS SAR images, and a model to calculate the sea heights at the time the images were taken. By combining these data a set of quasi-contours is generated, and from these it is possible to devise a digital elevation model of the foreshore. Each of these quasi-contours is associated with the time its image was taken, and it is therefore necessary to interpolate in time and space. Such interpolation allows the creation of time- dependent DEMs which can be used to study the long-term evolution of the foreshore. This paper demonstrates the technique by following its application to the length of UK coastline of most interest to the NERC Land-Ocean Interaction Study Community Programme, the 100km from the Humber estuary to the Wash. The INDUS project funded under the British National Space Centre Earth Observation LINK scheme is further refining the accuracy of the technique and extending its application to cover more of the coastal regions of the UK, as well as establishing the requirements of users.© (1996) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.