Detection of dust sources by land use type, using remote sensing techniques and fuzzy logic, case study: south-east Ahwaz

Dust storms is one of the most important environmental hazards, especially in arid and semi-arid climates, which causes irreparable damages to the various dimensions of the environment. The aim of this study was to identify dust sources in south-east Ahwaz, using a remote sensing technique and fuzzy logic. For this purpose, the satellite images of dust events of Ahwaz City were investigated and the wind characteristic of the study area were studied by plotting the storm rose of Ahvaz Synoptic Station. In the next step, the criteria were categorized into two categories: soil moisture, land surface temperature and vegetation constitute the main layers and land use, spatial data of soil, climate, slope and sedimentology were used as constraint layers. The main layers were extracted from Landsat OLI-TIRS satellite images. The Boolean method were used to standardize the constraint layers, and the fuzzy membership functions were used to standardize the main layers. Also, main layers weighting was done using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. Finally, the dust sources map was obtained by overlapping the layer. To validate the results, 44 ground control point were selected from the study area that showed high accuracy (81.8%) for identified areas. Based on investigating of satellite image and storm rose of Ahvaz Synoptic Station, the south-east of Ahwaz was recognized as dust-generating source and 145162.01 ha of lands are dust generating sources from which 69343/01 ha (47.77%) belongs to destroyed rangelands and 335.99 ha (0.23%) belongs to Canebrake, contains the highest and lowest level of sources of dust production in the study area, respectively.