Structural lineament mapping of Central-Eastern high atlas, Morocco, using ASAR/Envisat and SAR/sentinel 1B data

Abstract

The Central-Eastern part of the High Atlas is dominated by carbonate of Mesozoic age which is affected by the Alpine Orogeny. The deformation manifest in area by different geological structures. The analysis of these later lead to their classification in different category for understanding the geodynamic of the area. This study focuses to map structural lineaments in the Central-Eastern High Atlas using two types of Radar data: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)/Sentinel 1B with polarization (VV + VH) and Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR)/Envisat with polarization (VV + HH). This research aims to demonstrate the utility of Radar data for extracting structural lineaments in carbonate deposits. In this work, two techniques of processing data are used: First, the automatic extraction technique, we are employing the Algorithm Line Module of PCI Geomatica program, after the enhancement of images by applying the mean Co-occurrence filter. Second, the manual extraction technique, it was accomplished by applying directional filters with four directions (N00°, N45°, N90° and N135°) in order to highlight linear structures, then trace the detected lineaments. The synthetic maps of structural lineaments are developed by the two techniques. They are validated by using the lithologic maps extracted from Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI), the previous researches in the study area, shaded relief extracted from ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM), and field investigation data. The results present a good correlation between the direction of structural lineaments extracted from the satellite images and the field measurements. Therefore, the directions of lineaments extracted are N-S and E-W, NE-SW and NW-SE, especially the abundance of the direction N-S. This last one is perpendicular with the major faults. The density of structural lineaments in the study area is controlled particularly by the lithological nature and dynamic evolution, where the concentration is high in the Liassic carbonates. The geostatistical and spatial distribution of the structural lineaments led us to conclude that different tectonic factors are responsible for the distribution of lineaments in the surface of the study area. The comparison of two types of radar data shows that Envisat data is more efficient in the manual extraction than Sentinel 1B data. However, Sentinel 1B data is more efficient in the automatic extraction than Envisat data. This work identifies several families of structural lineaments which can be determined the tectonic phases of the Alpine orogeny affected the intracontinental Atlas basin.

Keywords:

• Central-Eastern High Atlas
• Sentinel 1B
• Envisat
• structural lineaments
• mapping

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank so much the Editor and Reviewers for their precious advice, thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving our manuscript. Moreover, the authors would like to thank Professor Ilham Bentahar for her English correction.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data availability

The authors confirm all data underlying the finding of this study are fully available without restriction.

Additional information

Funding

The research did not receive specific funding