The importance of river transportation, internationally and locally, is a well-known fact, where, it depends mainly on the efficiency of navigational route, In this research it was proposed to use an alternative method to determine the navigation safe path in the river Nile route with relatively low cost and high speed, by using remote sensing technique, which wasn't used before in the river Nile. For this reason a practical experiment using this technique has been made to prove the possibility of applying it successfully, by using multi-spectral band satellite image with resolution 1.65m, which covers an area of almost 15.52 Km²of the river Nile( of width=1Km and length=15.52Km) from Esna to nagaaHamadii. This study was made on three stages, only for 1Km of the Nile path, at which about 420 data points were available with known geographic position and observed depths with high accuracy.
In the first stage, the image was corrected geometrically, by using 7 ground control points, every pixel in the image contains reflected data representing its correct geographic position, but contaminated by errors from some external effects. The second stage concentrates on the removal of these errors, and getting the values of the corrected reflected radiance for every pixel in the image. In the third stage the corrected radiance values were used in a chosen suitable mathematical model, to compute the depths of the Nile bed. At the end these depth values were compared with the observed values. The average of the differences was about (80 Cm). This value is relatively small compared to the route depth of the Nile, therefore it supports and encourages using remote sensing technique, which is easier, cheaper and faster in determining the safe navigational route in the river Nile.
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