Monitoring Coastline Dynamics of Alakol Lake in Kazakhstan Using Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Alakol Lake is one of the largest hydrologically closed lake located in Balkash-Alakol River Basin in southeast Kazakhstan. Having a coastline approximately at 490 km, Alakol Lake has faced multiple threats due to both natural and anthropogenic factors as a result of tectonic movements, geology, wind-wave conditions, growing tourism activities, fishing, and transport, etc. The present study aims to investigate the historical trends in coastline changes along Alakol Lake in Kazakhstan and estimate its change rate by using remote sensing data in particular scale-space images Landsat-5 TM, 7 ETM+, 8 OLI, and Sentinel-2A. Based on Landsat and Sentinel data, the modified normalized difference water index was calculated to demonstrate the coastline changes along Alakol Lake between 1990 and 2018. Moreover, the monitoring and analysis of coastline dynamics is based on the main morphometric characteristics of Alakol Lake including water surface area, coastline length, geomorphology of the coast, etc. Our results reveal that there is a continuous coastline retreat, depending on the coast types. For example, in the case of the denudation coasts, a land inundation was from 120 to 270 m between 1990 and 2018. In the case of the accumulative coast (mainly northeast, north, and northwest coasts) a land inundation was from 200 to 900 m. A vast area of agricultural land around Alakol Lake become flooded and lost. This study demonstrates the importance of monitoring coastline dynamics because it provides essential information for understanding the coastal response to contemporary nature and anthropogenic impacts.

Energy Security and Sustainability in Eurasian Economic Union in the Terms of Economic Growth: The Case of Kazakhstan’s Energy Sector Up to 2040 Perspectives

“…In addition, process of industrialization and a lack of government attention to environment have resulted in large scale environment degradation. Among serious environmental problems are the shrinking of the Aral Sea and the steadily rising of water level of Caspian Sea (Valeyev et al, 2019), nuclear waste (Stawkowski, 2016), soil and water pollution Medetov et al, 2018).…”

Study of Fluctuations in Surface Area of Lake Haramaya using NDWI and MNDWI Methods

“…Previous studies on surface extraction using Google Earth Engine Platforms (Jiang et al, 2021), perceptron model (Mishra & Prasad, 2015) provided a great details on dynamics of water surface extraction. The usage of multi temporal Landsat imageries helped to a wide extent in analysing the reflectance property of water as stated by (Rokni et al, 2014;Valeyev et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2017). Also, MNDWI was the most effective method for enhancing the water features compared to NDWI is verified as stated by (Dibs, 2018;Szabó et al, 2016)…”

Monitoring climate change, drought conditions and wheat production in Eurasia: the case study of Kazakhstan

“…In contrast to air temperature, the change in the regime of atmospheric precipitation on the territory of Kazakhstan for the studied period is not obvious. It could be seen from Figure 4 that the annual precipitation in Kazakhstan spatially varies between 100-200 mm in Western Kazakhstan and 350–600 mm in Northern Kazakhstan; average rainfall was between 130 mm in central and southwestern regions to 350 mm in Northern Kazakhstan ( Karatayev et al., 2017 ; Valeyev et al., 2019 ). There have been positive and negative atmospheric precipitation anomalies since 1950 over Kazakhstan ( Table 2 ).…”