ADVANCES ON THE USE OF SATELLITE DERIVED PRODUCTS TO DETECT COASTAL CHANGES: DEMONSTRATION CASE ON THE COAST OF SPAIN

Abstract

Regular and efficient monitoring of coastal changes is necessary to inform coastal management decisions. In this regard, recent developments based on Google Earth Engine (Gorelick et al., 2017) enable the automatic detection of coastal changes using satellite data (Turner et al., 2021) However, such tools are usually calibrated with limited information and, consequently, they may lead to significant errors when applied to beaches with different conditions than those considered in the calibration data sets. In this work, we evaluate the capability to monitor changes in coastal morphology at various temporal and spatial scales using satellite-derived data obtained from an automatic processing method that includes site-specific information. These method was developed within the framework of the Coastal Erosion from Space Project (https://coastalerosion.argans.co.uk/) that brought together experts from several countries with different backgrounds, such as Earth Observation, Geology, Engineering and Management, to develop satellite products to monitor coastal change based on end-user requirements.