Geomorphometirc Segmentation of Shield Deserts by Self-Organizing Maps

Abstract:

Shield deserts have developed on ancient crystalline bedrocks and mainly composed of folded and faulted rocks hardened by heat and pressure over millions of years. They were unearthed by erosion and form steep-sided hills and basins filled with sediments. The Sahara, Arabian, southern African, central Kavir and Australian deserts are in this group. Their ranges usually supply groundwater resources or in some regions contain huge oil reservoirs. Geomorphological segmentation of shield deserts is one of the fundamental tools in their land use or site investigation planning as well as in their surface water and groundwater management. In many studies the morphology of shield deserts has been investigated by limited qualitative and subjective methods using limited number of simple parameters such as surface elevation and slope. However the importance of these regions supports the need for their accurate and quantitative morphologic classification. The present study attempts to implement a quantitative method, Self-Organizing Map (SOM), for geomorphological classification of a typical shield desert within Kavir Desert, Iran. The area is tectonically stable and characterized by flat clay pans, playas, well-developed pediments around scattered and low elevation ranges. Twenty-two multi-scale morphometric parameters were derived from the first- to third-orders partial derivatives of the surface elevation. Seven optimized parameters with their proper scales were selected by Artificial Neural Networks, Optimum Index Factor, Davies-Bouldin Index and statistic models. Finally, the area was segmented to seven homogeneous areas by SOM algorithm. The results revealed the most distinguishing parameter set (MDPS) for morphologic segmentation of shield deserts. The same segmentation results through using MDPS for another shield deserts in Australia proves the applicability of MDPS for shield deserts segmentation.