Monitoring of coastline change using Sentinel-2A and Landsat 8 data, a case study of Cam Pha city - Quang Ninh province

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of Sentinel - 2A and Landsat 8 data in monitoring coastline change from 1999 to 2018 at Cam Pha city, Quang Ninh province. Both data were collected under similar conditions of time and weather features to minimize the differences in interpretation results caused by these factors. The coastline was extracted from Sentinel-2A and Landsat 8 in 2018 by using the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI). Coastline map from Quang Ninh Department of Natural Resources and Environment with a scale of 1: 50.000 in 1999 was used as a reference of the same mask and overlaid on coastline maps in 2018 to identify the changes in the study area. The data from fieldwork and Google Earth was used to evaluate the accuracy and make comparative comments. The results presented that changes dramatically occurred between 1999 and 2018 with the accretion process prevailing. This process took place quite strongly on the East and Southeast coast while the erosion process only occurred with small areas at scattered points in the study area. The results also showed that the overall classification accuracy of Sentinel-2A imagery (95.0%) was slightly higher than that of Landsat-8 (87.5%). The combined use of Landsat-Sentinel-2 imagery is expected to generate reliable data records for continuous detecting of coastline changes.