scholarly journals BURNT AREA DETECTION USING MEDIUM RESOLUTION SENTINEL 2 AND LANDSAT 8 SATELLITES

Author(s):  
D. Ongeri ◽  
B. K. Kenduiywo

Abstract. Forest fire is one of the most serious environmental problems in Kenya that influences human activities, climate change and biodiversity. The main goal of this study is to apply medium resolution sensors (Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel 2 MSI) to produce burnt area severity maps that will include small fires (< 100 ha) in order to improve burnt area detection and mapping in Kenya. Normalized burnt area indices were generated for specified pre- and post-fire periods. The difference between pre- and post-fire Normalized Burnt Ration (NBR) was used to compute δNBR index depicting forest disturbance by fire events. Thresholded classes were derived from the computed δNBR indices to obtain burnt severity maps. The spatial and temporal agreements of the Burnt area detection dates were validated by comparing against the MODIS MCD641 500 m products and MODIS Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) 1 km daily product hot-spot acquisition dates. This approach was implemented on Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform with a simple user interface that allows users to auto-generate burnt area maps and statistics. The operational GEE application developed can be used to obtain burnt area severity maps and statistics that allow for initial accurate approximation of fire damage.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 3232
Author(s):  
Nicola Genzano ◽  
Nicola Pergola ◽  
Francesco Marchese

Several satellite-based systems have been developed over the years to study and monitor thermal volcanic activity. Most of them use high temporal resolution satellite data, provided by sensors like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) that if on the one hand guarantee a continuous monitoring of active volcanic areas on the other hand are less suited to map thermal anomalies, and to provide accurate information about their features. The Multispectral Instrument (MSI) and the Operational Land Imager (OLI), respectively, onboard the Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellites, providing Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) data at 20 m (MSI) and 30 m (OLI) spatial resolution, may make an important contribution in this area. In this work, we present the first Google Earth Engine (GEE) App to investigate, map and monitor volcanic thermal anomalies at global scale, integrating Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI observations. This open tool, which implements the Normalized Hot spot Indices (NHI) algorithm, enables the analysis of more than 1400 active volcanoes, with very low processing times, thanks to the high GEE computational resources. Performance and limitations of the tool, such as its next upgrades, aiming at increasing the user-friendly experience and extending the temporal range of data analyses, are analyzed and discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 3539
Author(s):  
Haifeng Tian ◽  
Jie Pei ◽  
Jianxi Huang ◽  
Xuecao Li ◽  
Jian Wang ◽  
...  

Garlic and winter wheat are major economic and grain crops in China, and their boundaries have increased substantially in recent decades. Updated and accurate garlic and winter wheat maps are critical for assessing their impacts on society and the environment. Remote sensing imagery can be used to monitor spatial and temporal changes in croplands such as winter wheat and maize. However, to our knowledge, few studies are focusing on garlic area mapping. Here, we proposed a method for coupling active and passive satellite imagery for the identification of both garlic and winter wheat in Northern China. First, we used passive satellite imagery (Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 images) to extract winter crops (garlic and winter wheat) with high accuracy. Second, we applied active satellite imagery (Sentinel-1 images) to distinguish garlic from winter wheat. Third, we generated a map of the garlic and winter wheat by coupling the above two classification results. For the evaluation of classification, the overall accuracy was 95.97%, with a kappa coefficient of 0.94 by eighteen validation quadrats (3 km by 3 km). The user’s and producer’s accuracies of garlic are 95.83% and 95.85%, respectively; and for the winter wheat, these two accuracies are 97.20% and 97.45%, respectively. This study provides a practical exploration of targeted crop identification in mixed planting areas using multisource remote sensing data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (19) ◽  
pp. 2304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Huryna ◽  
Yafit Cohen ◽  
Arnon Karnieli ◽  
Natalya Panov ◽  
William P. Kustas ◽  
...  

A spatially distributed land surface temperature is important for many studies. The recent launch of the Sentinel satellite programs paves the way for an abundance of opportunities for both large area and long-term investigations. However, the spatial resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal images is not suitable for monitoring small fragmented fields. Thermal sharpening is one of the primary methods used to obtain thermal images at finer spatial resolution at a daily revisit time. In the current study, the utility of the TsHARP method to sharpen the low resolution of Sentinel-3 thermal data was examined using Sentinel-2 visible-near infrared imagery. Compared to Landsat 8 fine thermal images, the sharpening resulted in mean absolute errors of ~1 °C, with errors increasing as the difference between the native and the target resolutions increases. Part of the error is attributed to the discrepancy between the thermal images acquired by the two platforms. Further research is due to test additional sites and conditions, and potentially additional sharpening methods, applied to the Sentinel platforms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 2065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Feng Xu ◽  
Zhaofu Li ◽  
Shuyu Zhang ◽  
Naitao Huang ◽  
Zongyao Quan ◽  
...  

Winter wheat is one of the major cereal crops in China. The spatial distribution of winter wheat planting areas is closely related to food security; however, mapping winter wheat with time-series finer spatial resolution satellite images across large areas is challenging. This paper explores the potential of combining temporally aggregated Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI data available via the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for mapping winter wheat in Shandong Province, China. First, six phenological median composites of Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI reflectance measures were generated by a temporal aggregation technique according to the winter wheat phenological calendar, which covered seedling, tillering, over-wintering, reviving, jointing-heading and maturing phases, respectively. Then, Random Forest (RF) classifier was used to classify multi-temporal composites but also mono-temporal winter wheat development phases and mono-sensor data. The results showed that winter wheat could be classified with an overall accuracy of 93.4% and F1 measure (the harmonic mean of producer’s and user’s accuracy) of 0.97 with temporally aggregated Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 data were combined. As our results also revealed, it was always good to classify multi-temporal images compared to mono-temporal imagery (the overall accuracy dropped from 93.4% to as low as 76.4%). It was also good to classify Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI imagery combined instead of classifying them individually. The analysis showed among the mono-temporal winter wheat development phases that the maturing phase’s and reviving phase’s data were more important than the data for other mono-temporal winter wheat development phases. In sum, this study confirmed the importance of using temporally aggregated Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI data combined and identified key winter wheat development phases for accurate winter wheat classification. These results can be useful to benefit on freely available optical satellite data (Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 MSI) and prioritize key winter wheat development phases for accurate mapping winter wheat planting areas across China and elsewhere.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elgar Barboza Castillo ◽  
Efrain Y. Turpo Cayo ◽  
Cláudia Maria de Almeida ◽  
Rolando Salas López ◽  
Nilton B. Rojas Briceño ◽  
...  

During the latest decades, the Amazon has experienced a great loss of vegetation cover, in many cases as a direct consequence of wildfires, which became a problem at local, national, and global scales, leading to economic, social, and environmental impacts. Hence, this study is committed to developing a routine for monitoring fires in the vegetation cover relying on recent multitemporal data (2017–2019) of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 imagery using the cloud-based Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. In order to assess the burnt areas (BA), spectral indices were employed, such as the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR), Normalized Burn Ratio 2 (NBR2), and Mid-Infrared Burn Index (MIRBI). All these indices were applied for BA assessment according to appropriate thresholds. Additionally, to reduce confusion between burnt areas and other land cover classes, further indices were used, like those considering the temporal differences between pre and post-fire conditions: differential Mid-Infrared Burn Index (dMIRBI), differential Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR), differential Normalized Burn Ratio 2 (dNBR2), and differential Near-Infrared (dNIR). The calculated BA by Sentinel-2 was larger during the three-year investigation span (16.55, 78.50, and 67.19 km2) and of greater detail (detected small areas) than the BA extracted by Landsat-8 (16.39, 6.24, and 32.93 km2). The routine for monitoring wildfires presented in this work is based on a sequence of decision rules. This enables the detection and monitoring of burnt vegetation cover and has been originally applied to an experiment in the northeastern Peruvian Amazon. The results obtained by the two satellites imagery are compared in terms of accuracy metrics and level of detail (size of BA patches). The accuracy for Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 in 2017, 2018, and 2019 varied from 82.7–91.4% to 94.5–98.5%, respectively.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 1065 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Xiong ◽  
Prasad Thenkabail ◽  
James Tilton ◽  
Murali Gumma ◽  
Pardhasaradhi Teluguntla ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 11486
Author(s):  
Shahab Ud Din ◽  
Khan Muhammad ◽  
Muhammad Fawad Akbar Khan ◽  
Shahid Bashir ◽  
Muhammad Sajid ◽  
...  

Despite low spatial resolutions, thermal infrared bands (TIRs) are generally more suitable for mineral mapping due to fundamental tones and high penetration in vegetated areas compared to shortwave infrared (SWIR) bands. However, the weak overtone combinations of SWIR bands for minerals can be compensated by fusing SWIR-bearing data (Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8) with other multispectral data containing fundamental tones from TIR bands. In this paper, marble in a granitic complex in Mardan District (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in Pakistan is discriminated by fusing feature-oriented principal component selection (FPCS) obtained from the ASTER, Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) and Sentinel-2 MSI data. Cloud computing from Google Earth Engine (GEE) was used to apply FPCS before and after the decorrelation stretching of Landsat-8, ASTER, and Sentinel-2 MSI data containing five (5) bands in the Landsat-8 OLI and TIRS and six (6) bands each in the ASTER and Sentinel-2 MSI datasets, resulting in 34 components (i.e., 2 × 17 components). A weighted linear combination of selected three components was used to map granite and marble. The samples collected during field visits and petrographic analysis confirmed the remote sensing results by revealing the region’s precise contact and extent of marble and granite rock types. The experimental results reflected the theoretical advantages of the proposed approach compared with the conventional stacking of band data for PCA-based fusion. The proposed methodology was also applied to delineate granite deposits in Karoonjhar Mountains, Nagarparker (Sindh province) and the Kotah Dome, Malakand (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province) in Pakistan. The paper presents a cost-effective methodology by the fusion of FPCS components for granite/marble mapping during mineral resource estimation. The importance of SWIR-bearing components in fusion represents minor minerals present in granite that could be used to model the engineering properties of the rock mass.


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