Monitoring Coastal Salinity Level and Its Impact on the Environment by Developing an Empirical Remote Sensing Model

Climate change has a significant impact on the coastal water salinity. It’s known that temperature and salinity levels are directly related, as the temperature increases, the salinity level will also increase and vice versa. Due to global warming in the United Arab Emirates can potentially increase the salinity. Furthermore, desalination plants’ brine discharge is another reason for increasing salinity levels. The Layyah, biggest desalination plant in Sharjah, UAE has been discharging its brine for many years in the coastal water. Therefore, it is essential to know the long-term implications of the salinity changes in the vicinity of this desalination plant. The objective of this study was to assess the salinity level on the coast of Sharjah using an empirical remote sensing model. To achieve the objective of this study, salinity monitoring data was collected from the intake and discharge locations of the Layyah desalination plant for the year 2018, 2019, and 2020. Satellite images from Landsat 8 program were acquired for every month closest to the monitoring time. A total of 72 images were used in the model. All the images were preprocessed for atmospheric, radiometric, and geometric corrections. Reflectance values of different bands were isolated from each image to develop the empirical model relating the spectral reflectance to the measured salinity levels. Different band combinations of Landsat imagery were used to develop the model. The results showed that the model with the highest coefficient of determination (R2) was with blue band with a value of 36.9%.