Study evoluton of sand-spit at the Tien Chau estuary using Landsat satellite images

Abstract

The Tien Chau inlet, where the Ky Lo river discharges into the southern part of Xuan Dai Bay, belongs to the An Ninh Dong ward, Tuy An district. This place has been a shelter area for over 400 vessels of Tuy An and other districts of Phu Yen province. The inlet is frequently accreted and shifted, causing difficult and unsafe navigation of vessels on their routes to seek for shelter and sell fishing products. This paper presents the results of a research on the evolution patterns of the sand-spit to the north of Tien Chau inlet as well as the analysis on the linkage between river dynamic factors to the past evolutions of the sand-spit and the inlet, using col-lected Landsat images from 1988 to 2019 and Sentinel images from 2016 to 2020. The results highlight the strong relationship between geometries of both the Tien Chau inlet and the northern sand-spit, and the peak discharge Qmax of the Ky Lo river