1. The Dying Dead Sea Assessing the decline of the Dead Sea area in relation to irrigated agriculture Noel Peterson and Zach Tagar FR 5262

2. Off basin Water diversion since 1960’s Israel’s National Water Carrier – one of several causes for the decline of the Dead Sea

3. Water level 1900 The dying of the Dead Sea

5. Measuring Surface Area Change Based on Landsat band 4 (near-IR) Examined histograms in ArcMap to determine cutoff for water: bimodal distributions.

6. Measuring Surface Area Change Using cutoff values determined by histograms, we created binary images using ArcMap’s Reclass tool. Output clipped to Dead Sea area to remove misclassified shadows.

7. Measuring Surface Area Change Converted rasters to polygons and removed the rest of the misclassified spots. By putting polygon features in a geodatabase, areas are calculated automatically.

8. Results YearFull Area (km^2)North Area (km^2) 1900880.9234874.5845 1984901.1682682.2036 1985895.1553680.6817 1989884.7729665.4978 1990884.1348662.5881 1998894.8385650.3202 2003867.0753641.1735 2009858.9582622.0044 Note: 1900 values calculated by reclassifying SRTM DEM (90m spatial resolution) with an historical surface elevation measurement instead of satellite imagery and histogram values.

9. Results

10. Assessing extent of (irrigated) agriculture (Data: Landsat 5 2003/2009)

11. Try 1: NDVI Band 4NDVI No variability between classes

12. Try 2: unsupervised classification (40 classes) Same class for agriculture and nature

13. Try 3: supervised classification Defining AOI’s across the country (430 - 480) (Ag, natural vegetation/desert; water; urban)

14. Stats…

15. Try 3: supervised classification Sort of working!

16. Classification 1Classification 2

17. Accuracy Assessment - no reference map! 200 random points from ArcMap …

18. … to Google Earth (import shapefile in Google Earth Pro Trial version)

19. Manual inspection…

22. Results: classification 4Reference AgricultureNatural vegetationUrbanWater Agriculture 4228770 Natural vegetation 942255170 Urban 1312100 Water 3411032 125 18352653432 % correct: 68.31% Error of Omission (ag): 33.33% Error of Comission (ag) 46.15% No. of pixels: 6,233,765 30 m resolution; 900 sq/m Total area ag: 5610.389 sq/Km