Dear Tesfa,

You can use high resolution satellite images (QuickBird (0.65 M), SPOT (1.5 M), IKONOS (0.82 M), Worldview-2 (0.46), Pleiades (0.5)). They are not free and also cost money.

HEC-RAS could be a good tool for your request.

Dear Brother,

Offcourse you can do it but with certain degree of uncertainty using sat images. I would suggest to use IDRISI selva for erosion and sedimentation modeling.

Wish you all the best.

Thank you very much, potential researchers; Mesenbet Yibeltal Sebhat Imran Ahmad, and Endalkachew Abebe Kebede, for your fruitful professional suggestions. I am interested to see the urbanization impact on the spatial and temporal bed level change (which indicates aggradation or degradation of the river bed), and bank erosion using high-resolution satellite images.

Do remember river channels are 3-dimensional. Satellite imagery is 2-dimensional, although some imagery can differentiate between shallow and deep water. The 3rd dimension, depth, is critical to channel morphology. Others have already mentioned that channel bed presents problems for sat. imagery. True, surface morphology largely reflects current movements at depth and consequently bed form, but there are issues in extrapolating them.

kind regards

George Strachan

So, yes there are difficulties and limitations to using satellite imagery for studying channel morphology, particularly the channel bed as George J. Strachan pointed out that the 3rd dimension - channel depth is critical to channel morphology. Endalkachew Abebe Kebede

Dear my brother, Tesfa G.

Let me share with you one study which might be the same with your request.

GIS and recent advanced Remote Sensing technology are used to identify and quantify the map planform changes with the integration of serious field observation. A topographic map, latest Landsat images, and recent Spot images of (recent time) (1.5 x 1.5) m spatial resolution is needed to delineate planform change features of the river reach over the last many years.

Approaches and methods

Field observation, including ground control points for geo-referencing, have been collected using GPS, and desk data analysis aimed at extracting river planform change parameters and identifying spatial and temporal variation using ArcGIS 10.3 were used in this study of planform change assessment. The first task in this study was the preparation of reference condition of study reach which is the original state of the river reach before it undergoes planform change. The reference condition was established by gathering and analyzing historical data as well as historical theoretical references based on expert judgments while taking data availability into account. The reference condition was created using a topographic map from the Ethiopian Mapping Agency from 1984 (1:50,000). Between February and April, a temporal resolution of 12.5m x 12.5m was employed with a Landsat image from 1996 and a Spot image from 2006 (5mx5m), 2016(1.5mx1.5m), and DEM (12.5m x 12.5m) from the USGS. The season was chosen so that the majority of Ethiopia is dry, minimizing overestimation due to temporal variance. GIS and Remote Sensing were used to identify and quantify the channel course changing, channel pattern shifting, bank erosion deposition, bank line shifting, channel width, and amount of migration.

Nice to hear from you!

Many thanks to my friend Mekash S. Kifelew

Hi Tesfa,

If it's the analysis of temporal changes in river morphology that you're after, I recommend to check out Google Earth Engine (https://earthengine.google.com/). This tool provides ample possibilities to monitor morphology change in space and time from GE imagery. Check out recent publications of D.A. Edmonds and coworkers.

Downside might be the 30 m resolution. Li et al. (2020) wrote and elegant paper on the possibilities to enhance the resolution:Article Digital Elevation Models for topographic characterisation an...

Good luck!