Use of Remote Sensing Data to Study the Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia - A Review in Geoscience: Water, Soil, Atmosphere and Geological Hazards

The Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia is the site of one of the world's greatest man-made disasters. Although irrigation has been developed since ancient times, massive water withdrawals since the second half of the twentieth century appear to have irreversibly dried up the Aral Sea and disrupted the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. This study reviews the use of satellite data over the last sixty years, using peer-reviewed papers available on Scopus. The focus is on geoscientific aspects such as atmosphere, water resources, geology and geological hazards. The main sensors used were Terra-MODIS, NOAA-AVHRR or the Landsat series. Some types of data have been little used, such as radar data, US or Soviet archives and very high resolution data such as OrbView-3. Remote sensing data provide an indispensable archive for monitoring the drying up of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest continental body of water. However, less than 8% of publications dealing with the Aral region use remote sensing. Sentinel-2 data are used to illustrate the construction of the Qosh Tepa Canal in Afghanistan, and in particular the problem of water leakage, which is emblematic of the regional dysfunction of water management.