Topography of the intertidal zone along the shoreline of Chittagong (Bangladesh) using PROBA-V imagery

ABSTRACT

Across the oceans shorelines, monitoring the topography of the intertidal zone is generally challenging. The present study is motivated by the recognized role of the intertidal topography in the near-shore hydrodynamics. We consider the region of Chittagong (northern Bay of Bengal) because of its propensity to powerful cyclone surges and associated inundation hazard. So as to curb the lack of in situ knowledge of intertidal topography, we present an original procedure relying on spaceborne optical imagery. Our method essentially amounts to a water line detection performed at various tidal levels. We apply our procedure to the recent PROBA-V (Project for On-Board Autonomy-Vegetation) multi-spectral imagery mission. The first step of our procedure concerns the shoreline extraction. PROBA-V imagery consists of four bands (Red, Blue, near-infrared – NIR, short-wave infrared – SWIR), which are then combined to generate an artificial red-green-blue (RGB) image. This RGB image is then converted into the hue-saturation-value (HSV) colour space. A simple thresholding is applied to hue and value channels to separate water masses from land masses. This process is applied to several images taken at different water levels (i.e. different parts of the tidal cycle) and the corresponding water lines are inferred. To estimate the altitude level of the water lines, we rely on tidal observations from two gauges located at Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar. We operate an ad-hoc extrapolation of the point-wise gauge data to generate a synthetic tidal water level record all along the shoreline. These synthetic tidal heights are then combined with the shorelines to generate the final digital elevation model (DEM). The DEM we generated covers a 40-km long stretch of shoreline around Chittagong city. We assessed this DEM by comparison with two independent data sets based on in situ surveys as well as on Pléiades spaceborne stereoscopy. We conclude that our DEM is accurate within 1 m to 2 m, which is within the error bar of these validation data sets. Our procedure being essentially objective, it is easy to automate, for processing of other imagery satellite, including at high resolution and/or in real time.

Acknowledgments

ESA/VITO provided PROBA-V data. We are thankful to Julien Michel and his team at CNES for providing the Pléiades DEM.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Belmont Forum G8 project BAND-AID [ANR-13-JCLI-0002 and NSF-ICER 1342644, http://Belmont-BanDAiD.org or http://Belmont-SeaLevel.org].