Utilization of remotely sensed data to detect anthropogenic impacts on sea surface temperature of Kuwait Bay, Kuwait

During last three decades, rapid urbanisation in Kuwait has been concentrated along the coastal zone, especially along the southern part of Kuwait Bay. The main impacts are related to the discharge of treated and untreated sewage; aquaculture; desalination of marine water; oil refinery plants near the shoreline; land filling and dredging activities; and construction of marinas. The distribution of desalination power plants around the bay affected marine ecosystems in terms of increasing water salinity and water temperature. Two Landsat images of different dates are used in this study to demonstrate the impacts on the sea surface temperature of anthropogenic activities along the coastal of Kuwait Bay. The first one is Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) dated June, 22 1985 and the second one is Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) dated April, 29 2003. The master Landsat image of 22/6/1985 was geometrically corrected using 14 ground control points (GCPs) extracted from a topographic base map (scale 1:50,000). It was projected into a UTM coordinate system with spheroid WGS 84 and datum WGS 84 (zone 39). The other image was registered using the geometrically corrected master image. The mean square error of the georeferenced image is less than 0.5 pixels. Then, an unsupervised classification (10 classes) was used to produce a water-only mask and water-only images of the study area. ERDAS Imagine software was used to produce the subsets of the study area for different water-only images. The radiometric correction was applied to the different Landsat images to convert the digital number (DN) values of image pixels into at-sensor radiance. Finally thermal infrared sensors (band 6) of each Landsat image were used to measure the sea surface temperature (SST) of Kuwait Bay. Results indicate that there is a positive relationship between anthropogenic activities, especially the desalination power plants and increases the SST in Kuwait Bay.