River Channel Evolution in the Minjiang Estuary Area and It Affecting Factor Analysis

Compared with traditional investigation methods,the remote sensing-based coastline interpretation method has its advantages of large range,multiple periods, time saving,labour saving and high speed.In this paper,the multi-temporal Landsat- TM images are used to interprete the coastline in the Minjiang estuary area and analyze the river channel evolutions in the estuary area in combination with the topographic map in 1 960 s and the marine chart in 2 0 0 1 . It is shown from the analysis results that most of the southern channels in the Minjiang estuary area were silted up,and the coastlines of the northern channels were weakly eroded;the underwater shoals in the southern part were developed in recent years and the shoal area has been extended greatly,but the changes in the northern channels were smaller.Finally,the factors affecting the river channel evolution are also discussed preliminarily.