Iraqi National Journal of Earth Sciences

Abstract

Saline soil problems are one of the most common land processes and reflects severe environmental hazard. In order to study the spectral reflectance characteristics of the soil salinity levels, an area located in the Northern Al-Jazirah Irrigation Project was selected. The main objective of this study is to investigate the potential of identifying and predicting salt content in soils at various irrigated areas according to the spectral reflectance characteristics of the soils Analytical Spectral Devices (ASD) spectroradiometer (in contact probe mode) with spectral range from 350 nm to 2500 nm was used to measure the spectral reflectance characteristics of the collected soil samples.
Laboratory measurements have indicated that saline soils have higher reflectance characteristics than do nonsaline soils. The near and middle infrared bands were superior to the visible bands in detecting different soil salinity levels. The supervised classification of the available ETM+ image demonstrated that spectral separation of different soil salinity levels and various land cover types is an efficient, reliable and dependable tool of using remote sensing to map soil salinity.