ABSTRACT
In the recent years, the Egyptian government and private sector have been interested in
developing the desert areas that located between the limestone plateau and the recent flood plain of
the River Nile
both
the east and west sides. These areas represent a corner stone as a source of
aggregate materials that used essentially as sub
-
base materials for roads and in concrete industry.
The development of these areas, however, will have a negati
ve impact on the supply of aggregate
materials so that new sources of aggregate materials must be identified. The current study deals
with using remote sensing technique in analysis of a Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus
(ETM
+
)
image of 2000, to develo
p a reliable method to identify and map the aggregate materials by
applying several processing techniques.
Our findings by using remote sensing techniques indicate that the principal component
analysis, decorrelation stretch, and minimum noise fraction a
s enhancement techniques with the
help of a supervised classification method, are the most suitable methods to detect and discriminate
between different types of aggregates, as well as to isolate these aggregates from the surrounding
materials. The results
of the current study indicate that there are two t
ypes of aggregates that have
been detected and isolated, the First unit is El
-
Yatim aggregates which laying on the Eocene plateau
(aggregate area up to 50 km in length, 10 km in width, and 60 meter in thic
kness) and belong to the
Pre
-
Eonile stage in the Egyptian Nile evolution. The second unit is Abu
-
Retag aggregate which
occurs at the foot of the Eocene plateau (aggregate area up to few kilometers in length and width
and 20 m in depth) and belongs to the
Eonile stage.
Field and laboratory investigations were
conducted to confirm the remote sensing output].