USE OF SATELLITE DATA AND POTENTIAL SURFACE ANALYSIS FOR URBAN EXPANSION SA KAEO PROVINCE, THAILAND

ABSTRACT: In urban planning, the Potential Surface Analysis (PSA) technique is widely used for suitability analysis. This method requires an appropriate ranking technique for weighting the PSA’s factors based on the physical data of the studying area. However, PSA is a complex analytical technique and uses a variety of parameters for calculation. Geographic Information System (GIS) plays an important role in analyzing and increasing the accuracy of the weight of parameters in a PSA approach. To create the physical database, the parameters of the urban area were considered. The PSA data are generally collected from the field. Therefore, the process of data collection is time consuming and requires a large number of man power and budget. This research uses a LANDSAT-5 and THEOS satellite data with visual interpretation to identify urban expansion areas and settlement patterns in 3 periods; 1993, 2003 from LANDSAT and 2013-2014 from THAICHOTE. In this research, Sa Kaeo Province was selected as a study area because it is a part of East-West Economic Corridor (EWEC) and Southern Economic Corridors (SEC) which is link from Myanmar to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Due to a large number of developers currently investing in Sa Kaeo, its environment is subject to change rapidly resulting in urban sprawl. The results of this study show that PSA combining with GIS technology can be applied for urban planning particularly for classifying urban expansion and promoting sustainable urban development. Therefore, this technique is effective for urban management of Sa Kaeo. The results show that the urban areas of Sa Kaeo Provinc