Monitoring and Measuring the Changes of the Dead Sea Area Using Remote Sensing and GIS Applications

Abstract

The aim of this study was to apply and evaluate four different methods in order to monitor and measure the changes of the Dead Sea area using GIS and remote sensing technique as well as multi-spectral images acquired in 1987, 1996, 2003, and 2009 by Landsat ETM+ sensor. The four methods are (Manual Digitizing, Unsupervised Classification, NDWI, and MNDWI); the results show that all these method can be used to extract the water body area. The results revealed that the best method which can be used, to measure the changes in water bodies, is The Modified Normalized Differences Water Index (MNDWI) with Green and MIR bands, where the achieved accuracy is better than the other methods. The results show that the Dead Sea area decreased about 40 km2 between 1987 and 2009.