Use of airborne laser scanning to characterise land degradation processes - the Dead Sea as a case study

Evaluation of surface processes requires efficient means to quantify their effect. Despite the span and three-dimensionality of these processes, they are usually monitored using land surveying or naive 2D image interpretation. Therefore, the results are partial in terms of coverage and detail, and are mostly qualitative. We study in this paper the application of high resolution airborne laser scanning data for detection and characterisation of geomorphic processes. The Dead Sea region, where lake level drop of >1 m/year has led to dramatic change in the surrounding geomorphic system, and is endangering the natural environment and infrastructure, is used here as our case study. We propose a feature extraction methodology which responds to the measurement noise and surface texture and show how laser data are optimal for detecting such phenomena, accurately characterising them and providing quantitative data, which are all necessary to understand their development.