Remote sensing has more advantages than the traditional methods of land surface water (LSW) mapping because it is a low-cost, reliable information source that is capable of making high-frequency and repeatable observations. The normalized difference water indexes (NDWIs), calculated from various band combinations (green, near-infrared (NIR), or shortwave-infrared (SWIR)), have been successfully...

A scene-average automated cloud-cover assessment (ACCA) algorithm has been used for the Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM ) mission since its launch by NASA in 1999. ACCA assists in scheduling and confirming the acquisition of global “cloud-free” imagery for the U.S. archive. This paper documents the operational ACCA algorithm and validates its performance to a standard error of 5 pe...

Operational monitoring of vegetation and land surface change over large areas can make good use of satellite sensors that measure radiance reflected from the Earth’s surface. Monitoring programs use multiple images for complete spatial coverage over time. Accurate retrievals of vegetation cover and vegetation change estimates can be hampered by variation, in both space and time, in the measured...

Agriculture drought occurs when moisture level in soils is insufficient to maintain average crop yields. Initial consequences are in the reduced seasonal output of crops & other related production. An extreme agricultural drought can lead to a famine, which is a prolonged shortage of food in a restricted region causing widespread diseases and deaths from starvation. Agriculture drought is mainl...

The accuracies of rice classifications determined from density slices of broadband moisture indices were compared to results from a standard supervised technique using six reflective Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+) bands. Index-based methods resulted in higher accuracies early in the growing season when background moisture differences were at a maximum. Analysis of depth of ETM+ band 5 res...

There is considerable interest in using remote sensing to characterize the hydrologic behavior of the land surface on a routine basis. Information on moisture fluxes between the surface and lower atmosphere reveals linkages and land–atmosphere feedback mechanisms, aiding our understanding of energy and water balance cycles. Techniques that combine information on land and atmospheric properties ...

Remote sensing techniques play increasingly important role over recent decades in both problems of global climate change and frequent deterioration of the status of aquatic ecology, driven by the ever-increasing needs of growing populations for drinking water, polluted by overland runoff from point and non-point sources, as well as fish and other seafood (Pozdnyakov et al., 2005). With the adve...

This paper reports on an investigation of radiometric calibration errors due to differences in spectral response functions between satellite sensors when attempting cross-calibration based on near-simultaneous imaging of common ground targets in analogous spectral bands. Five Earth observation sensors on three satellite platforms were included on the basis of their overpass times being within 4...

Using data fusion of multi-spectral and microwave radar images, a semiautomatic method is developed based on the level set method for application to urban road extraction. The fast marching method of level set makes data fusion. Radar remote sensing image can make up road breaks due to shadowing of high building or tree canopy in multi-spectral image, while multi-spectral image can be of helpfu...

Assessing and monitoring rangelands in arid regions are important and essential tasks in order to manage the desired regions. Nowadays, satellite images are used as an approximately economical and fast way to study the vegetation in a variety of scales. This research aims to estimate the coverage percent using the digital data given by ETM+ Landsat satellite. In late May and early Ju...