英文摘要 |
Beaches are dynamic systems sensitive towards the effects of external forces, such as waves, currents, tides, and winds. Beach morphology provides essential information for hazard mitigation and coastal management, which is why many countries in the world have the beach surveillance programs to monitor the morphological changes. On the other hand, traditional methods of beach profile measurements are extremely time- and energy-consuming, especially for an island-wide investigation that is required for the likes of Taiwan. With the advantages of daily revisits and high image resolution provided by the FORMOSAT-2, we have the opportunity to use its images for monitoring the morphological changes along the sandy beach reaches in Taiwan. Waterline, one of the distinguished shoreline indicators, is collected from series of FORMOSAT-2 images and combined with tidal records to establish 3-D databases that can be used to make morphological maps of the intertidal beach. Due to the instability of the satellite image production, however, this practice did not bring us a more convenient, time-efficient, inexpensive, and reliable surveillance method for monitoring the beach morphology changes as we had expected. Nonetheless, in some shore reaches, when the seasonal change is not obvious, a morphological map produced from images of different seasons is still valuable. It could be used to identify the trends of morphological changes on a long term basis. |