Potential Applications for Highly Resolved Shorelines: A Cross-Validation Approach with Radar Altimetry
Abileah, Ron¹; Gómez-Enri, Jesús²; Scozzari, Andrea³; Vignudelli, Stefano^4
1JomegaK, UNITED STATES; ²University of Cadiz, SPAIN; ³CNR-ISTI, ITALY; ⁴CNR-IBF, ITALY

A 20 years long archive of altimetry measurements (by multiple missions) and a 30 years long archive of Landsat images represents an asset to map the temporal evolution of shorelines in relatively large water bodies during such period.

This work proposes the usage of the area-level relationship (retrieved from the shoreline assessment in the optical domain) as a complementary information to radar altimetry. Such relationship provides experimental opportunities even in portions of the water body where direct gauge measurements are unavailable.

In order to determine the area of a water body, high resolution imagery could be used. Unfortunately their availability is expensive, not available everywhere and with poor temporal resolution. However, the native resolution of Landsat data (with about 30 years of data freely available) is not accurate enough for most of applications.

In this poster, a novel method to map accurately shorelines in inland waters is presented and discussed. The proposed method can be used to study long term shoreline changes and their relationship with altimetry measurements, by exploiting the 20 years long archive of altimetry measurements and the 30 years of archived world-wide coverage Landsat imagery.

Case studies are under selection, according to their peculiarities, i.e., shoreline shape, type of the water body, nature of the surrounding land, water level variability, etc. The potential to measure changes at the land/water interface will be illustrated, and the implications with the altimetry timeseries will be analized.