REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES AS A TOOL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING

Abstract. The disposal of the solid wastes in landfill sites should be properly monitored by analyzing samples from soil, water, and landfill gases within the landfill site. Nevertheless, ground monitoring systems require intensive efforts and cost. Furthermore, ground monitoring may be difficult to be achieved in large geographic extent. Remote sensing technology has been introduced for waste disposal management and monitoring effects of the landfill sites on the environment. In this paper, two case studies are presented in the Trail Road landfill, Ottawa, Canada and the Al-Jleeb landfill, Al-Farwanyah, Kuwait to evaluate the use of multi-temporal remote sensing images to monitor the landfill sites. The work objectives are: 1) to study the usability of multi-temporal Landsat images for landfill site monitoring by studying the land surface temperature (LST) in the Trail Road landfill, 2) to investigate the relationship between the LST and the amount of the landfill gas emitted in the Trail Road landfill, and 3) to use the multi-temporal LST images to detect the suspicious dumping areas within the Al-Jleeb landfill site. Free archive of multi-temporal Landsat images are obtained from the USGS EarthExplorer. The Landsat images are then atmospherically corrected and the LST images are derived from the thermal band of the corrected Landsat images. In the Trail Road landfill, the results reveal that the LST of the landfill site is always higher than the air temperature by 10^°C in average as well as the surroundings. A correlation is also observed between the recorded emitted methane (CH₄) from the ground monitoring stations and the LST derived from the Landsat images. Based on the findings in the Al-Jleeb landfill, five locations are identified as suspicious dumping areas by overlaying the highest LST contours generated from the multi-temporal LST images. The study demonstrates that the use of multi-temporal remote sensing images can provide supplementary information for landfill site monitoring.