Vol.4, No.6, 355-361 (2012) Natural Science http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ns.2012.46049 Analysis of urban growth at Cairo, Egypt using remote sensing and GIS Mohamed E. Hereher Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science at Damietta, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt;
[email protected] Received 21 January 2012; revised 22 February 2012; accepted 11 March 2012 ABSTRACT by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) on- board the Space Shuttle Endeavor in its journey during The main objective of the present study was to Dec. 2000. DEM images are available in 30, 90 and 1000 highlight and analyze the exchange between the m spatial resolutions. The 30 m resolution DEMs are land cover components at Cairo with focusing available only to the United States, whereas the 90 m and on urban area and agricultural land between 1000 m resolution are available to the entire world and 1973 and 2006 using Landsat satellite data with could be accessed from the United States Geological the aid of Digital Elevation Models (DEM). The Survey (USGS) online open resources. techniques utilized in this investigation involved In Egypt, remote sensing and its applications have a rigorous supervised classification of the Land- emerged as early as this technology was invented. Early sat and the DEM images. Results showed that 2 studies were based on visual interpretation of MSS data urban area of Cairo was 233.78 km in 1973 and to map sand accumulations in the Western Desert [2]. increased to 557.87 km2 in 2006. The cut-off from 2 During 1980s, soil salinization was a good target to mo- agricultural lands was 136.75 km , whereas ur- nitor in satellite images [3].