Assessment of the change in the surface area of Iraq’s waters between 2019 and 2024

Remote sensing techniques are advanced systems and tools that are highly effective in measuring huge areas covered by water in a short period of time compared to traditional methods. In this paper, we focus on calculating the area of all water bodies and rivers in Iraq using remote sensing techniques and Geographic Information System (GIS). To detect variations in the water surface area, Landsat 8 satellite images were taken in two time periods. In this research, many classification techniques were used with multiple Band Combinations. The classification technique that gives the best results is maximum likelihood and (564) band composite, that applied to extract the results to find the total water surface areas in Iraq. The results displayed that the surface area of the water in July 2019 was 10081.2447 km2 and that the surface area in July 2024 was 5133.4974 km2.