Turner I. L., Harley M. D., Almar Rafaël, Bergsma E. W. J. (2021). Satellite optical imagery in coastal engineering. Coastal Engineering, 167, p. 103919 [8 p.]. ISSN 0378-3839.
Turner I. L., Harley M. D., Almar Rafaël, Bergsma E. W. J.
Source
Coastal Engineering, 2021,
167, p. 103919 [8 p.] ISSN 0378-3839
This Short Communication provides a Coastal Engineering perspective on present and emerging capabilities of satellite optical imagery, including real-world applications that can now be realistically implemented from the desktop. Significantly, at the vast majority of locations worldwide, satellite remote sensing is currently the only source of information to complement much more limited in-situ instrumentation for land and sea mapping, monitoring and measurement. Less well recognised is that publicly available, routinely sampled and now easily accessible optical imagery covering virtually every position along the world's coastlines already spans multiple decades. In the past five years the common obstacles of (1) limited access to high-performance computing and (2) specialist remote sensing technical expertise, have been largely removed. The emergence of several internetaccessible application programming interfaces (APIs) now enable applied users to access petabytes of satellite imagery along with the necessary tools and processing power to extract, manipulate and analyse information of practical interest. Following a brief overview and timeline of civilian Earth observations from space, satellitederived shorelines (SDS) and satellite-derived bathymetry (SDB) are used to introduce and demonstrate some of the present real-world capabilities of satellite optical imagery most relevant to coastal professionals and researchers. These practical examples illustrate the use of satellite imagery to monitor and quantify both engineered and storm-induced coastline changes, as well as the emerging potential to obtain seamless topo/bathy surveys along coastal regions. Significantly, timescales of satellite-derived changes at the coast can range from decades to days, with spatial scales of interest extending from individual project sites up to unprecedented regional and global studies. While we foresee the uptake and routine use of satellite-derived information becoming quickly ubiquitous within the Coastal Engineering profession, on-ground observations are - and in our view will remain - fundamentally important. Compared to precision in-situ instrumentation, present intrinsic limitations of satellites are their relatively low rates of revisit and decimetre spatial accuracy. New satellite advances including 'video from space' and the potential to combine Earth observation with numerical and datadriven coastal models through assimilation and artificial intelligence are advances that we foresee will have future major impact in Coastal Engineering.
