Remote sensing reveals the impact mechanism between surface suspended sediment concentration and coastline change in the Yellow River Estuary

Abstract:

The Yellow River is characterized with one of the world’s highest sediment content. Through transportation of the river, a tremendous amount of sediment is accumulated at the estuary of the Yellow River. Consequently, the coastline of the Yellow River estuary is constantly changing under the co-influences of sediment charge, sea-level rise, coastal process, and other factors. In this study, the Landsat archives (i.e., TM, ETM+, and OLI images) were exploited to quantitatively retrieve the surface suspended sediment concentration (SSSC) in a region of the Yellow River estuary and to monitor changes in the Yellow River estuary coastline from 2002 to 2018.Hundreds of Landsat images were processed to obtain a fairly continuous sequence of SSSCs and coastline locations on the Google Earth Engine platform. Results show that the SSSC retrieved in the estuary has a significant correlation with the in situ annual sediment transport amount of the Yellow River (R² = 0.976, p = 0.0016). For the northern half of the Yellow River estuary, we found that the average distance of coastline movement is related to the annual sediment transport amount of the Yellow River (R² = 0.291, p = 0.0257). Subsequently, We eliminated the impact of the sea level change on coastline movement by introducing sea level data from remote sensing, in situ measurement, and hydrodynamic model, to explore the direct relationship between the SSSC and coastline changes, which can provide a reference for the ecological protection of the Yellow River estuary and the decision of the water and sediment regulation of the Yellow River.