Remote Sensing for Topography, Deformation and Flooding Mapping in Coastal Environment

Dear Colleagues,

Global megacities with populations of more than 10 million are mainly located in coastal lowlands and river deltas. The low-lying coastal lands are sensitive to global climate change, such as coastal flooding, storm surges, and bank erosion caused by sea level rise (SLR). At the same time, coastal lowland population centers that coincide with hydrocarbon production, fisheries, and agriculture suffer from serious subsidence. Those coastal subsiding areas, especially large river deltas, are heavily affected by underground solid or fluid mobilization due to natural and anthropogenic triggers. As a result, coastal areas are more vulnerable to the combined effects from subsidence and climate-induced SLR, leading to public safety and health threats such as flooding, wetland loss, and infrastructure damage. However, high-resolution and accurate coastal topography and coastal subsidence are not always readily available, and their contributions to the relative SLR are not well understood. Thus, we have a pressing need to understand how coastal areas are responding to SLR and human activities through better coastal topography, subsidence measurements, and flood modeling.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to use integrated remote sensing techniques to extract high-resolution accurate information and detect changes in coastal geomorphology and environment, to thereby understand the morphological and dynamic drivers. The coastal expert community is expected to answer questions about the potential impacts of different sea-level rise scenarios on coastal zones and assess the associated geomorphology and environmental vulnerability. The intersection of disciplines, observations, and data sets is the focus with the aim of translating it into information about spatio-temporal characteristics, such as the expression of sediment imbalances and ecosystem adjustments, drivers of human activities, levels of exposure, and adaptation to hazards. Remote sensing methods and observations from in situ, airborne, and spaceborne platforms provide large-scale, high-temporal-resolution data of coastal environments. This Special Issue will facilitate an informed debate among scientists and stakeholders on the coastal geomorphology and environment affected by global climate change and human activities.

The potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Coastal remote sensing;
• Coastal topography;
• Coastal subsidence;
• Coastal hazards;
• Coastal erosion;
• Coastal inundation;
• Coastal wetland;
• Tidal flats;
• Flooding risks;
• Land-sea surface processes;
• Radar interferometry;
• GNSS;
• Wetland hydrological ecology;
• Sea level rise;
• Climate change;
• Data fusion;
• Machine learning;
• Deep learning.

Dr. Peng Li
Dr. Dimitra Kitsiou
Dr. Cunren Liang
Guest Editors

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• coastal remote sensing
• coastal subsidence
• coastal flooding
• coastal change detection
• coastal geomorphology
• coastal wetlands
• tidal flats
• coastal environmental vulnerability
• coastal processes and landforms
• climate change
• machine learning
• data fusion
• radar interferometry
• human activities