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Predicting rainfall 
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ce and Education 
REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES AS A TOOL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL 
MONITORING 
Kamil Faisal ***, Mohamed AlAhmad °, Ahmed Shaker * 
“ Department of Civil Engineering, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5B2K3 Canada -(ahmed.shaker, 
kamil.faisal)@ryerson.ca 
? Department of Geomatics, College of Environmental Design, King AbdulAziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 
* Environment public authority, Kuwait 
Commission VIII, WG VIII/8 
KEY WORDS: Remote Sensing, Multi Temporal Images, Landsat Images, Landfill Sites Monitoring, Land Surface Temperature, 
Landfill Gas 
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 stüdies 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 (CHy) 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. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Municipal solid waste management is a critical issue for urban 
management and city planning (Schubeler, 1996). The main 
purpose of waste management is to provide sufficient protection 
to the environment and the general public from the risky effects 
of waste (Yahaya et al, 2011). There are number of optical 
remote sensing sensors that are commonly used for Earth 
observation and environmental monitoring. Optical remote 
sensing sensors acquire images of the Earth surface by 
recording the solar radiation reflected from targets on the 
ground. Applications of remote sensing in environmental 
monitoring of the landfill sites aim to map its spatial extent, 
surrounding vegetation cover, and chemical composition of the 
Surface (Slonecker et al, 2010). These data can provide 
valuable information for environmental impact assessment 
within landfills and the surrounding areas. There are number of 
researches using satellite remote sensing images for landfill site 
monitoring. 
Nas et al. (2010) demonstrated a case study in the City of 
Konya, Turkey, for appropriate site selection for the landfill, 
using the GIS and multi-criteria evaluation (MCE). The ArcGIS 
ArcMap 9.0 and its extensions can be customized to build 
MCE. Eight GIS layers were acquired for this site selection, 
including the urban areas, land use/land cover, land slope, 
archaeological sites, transportation routes, local wells, and 
irrigational canals. Each layer was ranked with different weights 
where 0 indicated an unsuitable area and 10 indicated the most 
suitable area. The final map shows all the suitable locations for 
the landfill site for the different categories. The categories were 
classified as: 6.8% were the most appropriate, 15.796 were 
appropriate, 10.4% were moderately appropriate, 25.8% were 
poorly appropriate, and 41.3% were inappropriate. At the end of 
the analyses, three locations were identified as the most 
appropriate landfill site locations for the City of Konya. 
Ottavianelli et al. (2007) introduced the Synthetic Aperture 
Radar (SAR) interferometric products and hypersepctral data to 
monitor the Brogborough landfill located midway between 
Milton Keynes and Bedford in the U.K. The study used the 
ground-based SAR (GB-SAR) system to measure the 
microwave signals for the landfill site. The measurements of 
capped area and the open cells were conducted in the landfill 
site for a comparative analysis of angular measurements of 
polarizations. Moreover, coherence (or decorrelation) and SAR 
backscatter signal method were used to identify the dumping 
areas. The study demonstrated that the decorrelation method is 
of particular use to detect the properties and characteristics of 
the surface of the landfill, i.e., surface roughness, soil moisture 
affected by topography, speckle, and wave polarization. The