Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Water Resources Research Department, Water Research Institute, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

One of the most important features of the desert areas of Iran is the existence of windy sand dunes, which their dynamics and movement over time have distinguished them from many other geomorphological phenomena. The main objective of the present study is to evaluate the displacement of sand dunes in one of the largest sand complexes in the world, Rig Yalan in the east of the Loot desert. For this purpose, Sentinel-1 satellite images, which are considered SAR satellites, were used. In this regard, four Sentinel-1 satellite images were used at the beginning of summer 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. The offset tracking method was used to estimate the displacement of sand dunes in the study area. In the Offset Tracking method, the amount of horizontal displacements is measured by calculating the amount of deviation or correlation between two radar images taken from the same area. In this approach, the best match between the two images is achieved by maximizing the normalized cross-correlation. Based on the obtained results, during the study period, the amount of displacement of Yalan sand dunes in the closed and non-mobile areas has been up to a maximum of 3 meters per year in the large sand pyramids of the region, which are mainly concentrated in the center, west and south of the area. The movement of huts, ripple marks, longitudinal and transverse hills, and finally interconnected funnel-shaped sand pyramids of Yalan sand has not occurred in a fixed and definite direction and each part of it according to the morphological condition, the orientation of ridges as well as hill size and height different biases and displacements are observed. Based on the obtained results, all the features of the sand in Yalan sand are displaced on average about 0.94 meters per year.

Keywords

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