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Abstract

The current study sought to examine the coastal geomorphology throughout the entire length of the Al-Kharrar Lagoon, in addition to the coastal region of Rabigh City, situated on the western coast of Saudi Arabia. The mechanisms underlying the formation of the wide variety of natural land features were also studied. These include sandy, pebble and rocky beaches and sand dunes; intertidal areas; salt flats (sabkhas) and marshes; elevated, terraced or fringing coral reefs; water inlets; and the deposition of terrigenous or alluvial materials, all reflecting the swift transformation that has impacted the region. Evaluation of the ASTER (AST_L1T) data enabled the differentiation of several natural land cover types, the validity of which was subsequently confirmed through fieldwork. The satellite image data were contrast enhanced using several different processing applications to distinguish surface landforms. These methods encompassed true colour composite, enhanced true colour composite and false colour composite images, as well as principal component analysis (PCA) and a maximum likelihood algorithm. Mapping of the coastal environment and its characteristics, for example, vegetation coverage, mangroves, deposits in relation to the salt flats, wadi basins, shelf regions (both deep and shallow), islands, mud and sand sediments, rocky reefs and metropolitan areas, was achieved using band combination and PCA techniques. The findings from the image analysis demonstrated how the different landforms were distributed and how they had formed. Further research within the fields of geology, engineering and hydrology can be based on these empirical data, which can also support policy development at the government level.

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68

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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