Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Al-Razaza Lake Changes by Using Derived Indices and Remote Sensing Analysis

Abstract

AL-Razazah Lake is one of the Iraqi Lakes. it is known as big flood water store and fish’s wealth source. At the last three decades it suffers from highly extent of dehydration. This research proposes approach to identify the changes of this Lake in between 1990 to 2025 using remotely sensed satellite images. This research is conducted by many phases; Pre-processing, Processing, and Analyzing to remove the image’ s noise and applied the corrected image into next phase of the study. Then, this study was performed using different indices applied on the satellite images from Landsat Satellite System; Normalized-Difference-Water-Index (NDWI), and Normalized-Difference-Vegetation-Index (NDVI) to extract the AL-Razazah surface water Area. In addition, an unsupervised Approach was selected to perform image classification using the K-Means algorithm in order to classify the study area to many classes. The results reveal that the Lake was changed rapidly. The NDVI and NDWI show the highly decreasing in the area of AL-Razazah Lake about 81.17 % and 80.32% with area about of 1187.40 km2 and 1189.24km2. The results a highly dehydration extending, and all these drying areas were becoming a soil area, that will threat the wildlife and reduce the wealth of fish in AL-Razazah Lake. The outputs will be utilized for the researchers and analysts who would like to study the water bodies and the effect of the claim changes on water bodies in Iraq.     AL-Razazah Lake is one of the Iraqi Lakes. it is known as big flood water store and fish’s wealth source. At the last three decades it suffers from highly extent of dehydration. This research proposes approach to identify the changes of this Lake in between 1990 to 2025 using remotely sensed satellite images. This research is conducted by many phases; Pre-processing, Processing, and Analyzing to remove the image’ s noise and applied the corrected image into next phase of the study. Then, this study was performed using different indices applied on the satellite images from Landsat Satellite System; Normalized-Difference-Water-Index (NDWI), and Normalized-Difference-Vegetation-Index (NDVI) to extract the AL-Razazah surface water Area. In addition, an unsupervised Approach was selected to perform image classification using the K-Means algorithm in order to classify the study area to many classes. The results reveal that the Lake was changed rapidly. The NDVI and NDWI show the highly decreasing in the area of AL-Razazah Lake about 81.17 % and 80.32% with area about of 1187.40 km2 and 1189.24km2. The results a highly dehydration extending, and all these drying areas were becoming a soil area, that will threat the wildlife and reduce the wealth of fish in AL-Razazah Lake. The outputs will be utilized for the researchers and analysts who would like to study the water bodies and the effect of the claim changes on water bodies in Iraq.