Spatiotemporal variability of dune velocities and corresponding uncertainties, detected from optical image matching in the North Sinai Sand Sea, Egypt

Abstract

Understanding the relationship between climatic conditions and dune ecosystems requires the large-scale monitoring of spatiotemporal patterns of dune velocities. Due to their large extent and remoteness, dune fields are ideal for remote sensing techniques. Dune velocities in the Sand Sea North Sinai are characterized by large spatial and temporal variability. To this end, a total of 265 pairs from four Landsat-8 images from April 2013 to April 2018 were automatically matched with the COSI Corr engine to determine the dune velocities. These pairs were selected so that differences in the solar angles were small and spanned at least one year. This helps to reduce shadowing in the deformation fields and the error budget in converting displacements to annual velocities. To improve spatial coverage and reduce measurement uncertainty, the fusion of individual offset maps is considered feasible. We compared the performance of two methods (i.e., inversion and temporal median fusion) in performing the fusion of individual velocities, and the two methods showed good agreement. The fusion of individual velocities allowed us to estimate the final velocities for about 98.8% of the dune areas. Our results suggest that the magnitudes and directions of dune migration at Sand Sea are spatially and temporally variable. The geometric mean of the active features associated with 12 regions in the Sand Sea ranged from 1.65 m/y to 3.52 m/y, with median directions from 56.19◦ to 173.11◦ . The stable regions allowed us to estimate the 95% confidence intervals of the final velocities and extend these calculations to the dune targets. The median uncertainties were 0.10 m/y and 0.25 m/y for the stable and moving targets, respectively. We estimated the coherence of the final velocity vector, which can be considered as an indicator of the homogeneity of migration directions between the offset maps. We compared the final Landsat-8 velocities with those from Sentinel-2 to validate the results and found a good agreement in the magnitudes and directions. The process of selecting high-quality pairs and then fusing the individual maps showed a high performance in terms of spatial coverage and reliability of the extracted velocities.