Investigation and tracing of the buried roads of Karun River for exploitation of underground water sources (Shushtar Tadarkhavin)

Water scarcity in arid environment may cause critical social problems which needs special attention for searching new water resources. In plain regions, the river paleo-channel can be a good target. River paleochannels, depending on the size, sediments type and thickness can store a considerable amount of water. If the quality and quantity of water is suitable, then it can be considered as new water resources.

Karun River in Khuzestan plain is such a region which have many paleo-channels. The area between Shoshatar city in the north and Darkhovain city in the south suffers from unsuitable drinking water, industrial use and irrigation.

For this purpose, the study was undertaken to map and study the Karun river migration history and its paleo-channels. Karun River is affected by geological tectonic movements and sedimentation of the river on its channel. In terms of morphology, the river meanders are well known.

To study these features, the novel remote sensing science was used to see the picture as whole. Different image processing algorithm such as image enhancement and filters were applied on satellite images to enhance and map the paleo-channels between Shoshatr-Darkhovain cities. Also, supervised image classification provided relatively good results. The results show that Karun River during 1990 to 2014 has witness a tremendous change which has caused reduction in the amount of water along the river. This resulted in reduction of approximately 175 square kilometers in the Karun River area. Total length of paleo-channels calculated to about 356 km and if the average width of 250 meters for channels then, an area of about 89 million square meters (8900 ha) can be estimated.