Geological applications potential of DEM, ETM+, and gravity data in arid and semi-arid regions with special reference to
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Geological applications potential of DEM, ETM+, and gravity data in arid and semi-arid regions with special reference to south Western Desert, Egypt Mohamed Abdel Zaher & Nureddin M. Saadi & Koichiro Watanabeb
Received: 15 July 2012 / Accepted: 15 January 2013 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2013
Abstract The study area comprises the southeastern part of the Western Desert of Egypt. The aims of the present study are to delineate the major surface and subsurface structures and to evaluate tectonic framework of the study area. Surface studies of the present work are based mainly on data from two different types of remote sensing systems: 15 cloud-free Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) DEM data. The remote sensing data were used to recognize and extract geological lineaments by calculating and interpreting DEM derivatives, including shaded relief maps, slope maps, and traverse profiles. A Bouguer anomaly map (scale 1:500,000) was used to delineate a detailed picture of the subsurface structure in the study area. The analysis of surface data, including SRTM DEM and ETM+, was combined with subsurface data, including Bouguer anomaly map, and gave new insight into the tectonic and structure patterns of the study area. Keywords Landsat ETM+ . SRTM . Bouguer anomaly map . Integration . Western Desert . Egypt
M. Abdel Zaher National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, Helwan, Cairo 11421, Egypt M. Abdel Zaher (*) Physics Department, Oulu University, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] N. M. Saadi : K. Watanabeb Earth Resources Department, Faculty of Engineering, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan
Introduction The study area occupies the southeastern part of the Western Desert of Egypt (Fig. 1). Major parts of the area are covered by huge amounts of sand dunes and sand sheets that mask any surface expression on the subsurface structural framework. Consequently, remote sensing methods offer the best tools to study the subsurface geology. Data from many remote sensors have been employed with a host of innovative techniques to provide geologists with many valuable data sets, and Landsat data have been one of the primary data sources for glaciological research. Satellite remote sensing data found particular application in regional geological surveys in non-vegetated or sparsely vegetated, well-exposed arid and semi-arid environments (Rowan and Lathram 1980; Chuanyan et al. 2004). The combination of different remote sensing data (SRTM and ETM+) has been used with success to enhance the results obtained from image analysis in many different environmental applications (Masoud and Koike 2006; Demirkesen 2008; Saadi et al. 2011). Gravity data and seismic profiles have been used by Al Fastawi and Van Dijk (1990) for the purpose of interpreting the basement lineaments and correlated it with the surface linearities interpreted from Landsat TM and radar images, and they concluded that there was a strong relation between surface and subsurfac
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