Selection and quality assessment of Landsat data for the North American forest dynamics forest history maps of the US

Using the NASA Earth Exchange platform, the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project mapped forest history wall-to-wall, annually for the contiguous US (1986-2010) using the Vegetation Change Tracker algorithm. As with any effort to identify real changes in remotely sensed time-series, data gap...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of digital earth Vol. 9; no. 10; pp. 963 - 980
Main Authors Schleeweis, Karen, Goward, Samuel N., Huang, Chengquan, Dwyer, John L., Dungan, Jennifer L., Lindsey, Mary A., Michaelis, Andrew, Rishmawi, Khaldoun, Masek, Jeffery G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Taylor & Francis 02.10.2016
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Algorithms
Archives & records
Assessments
Dynamics
Earth
forest cover change
forest disturbance
Forests
Image quality
Landsat
nasa earth exchange
North American forest dynamics
Quality
Satellite imagery
time-series mapping
Vegetation
North America
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Using the NASA Earth Exchange platform, the North American Forest Dynamics (NAFD) project mapped forest history wall-to-wall, annually for the contiguous US (1986-2010) using the Vegetation Change Tracker algorithm. As with any effort to identify real changes in remotely sensed time-series, data gaps, shifts in seasonality, misregistration, inconsistent radiometry and cloud contamination can be sources of error. We discuss the NAFD image selection and processing stream (NISPS) that was designed to minimize these sources of error. The NISPS image quality assessments highlighted issues with the Landsat archive and metadata including inadequate georegistration, unreliability of the pre-2009 L5 cloud cover assessments algorithm, missing growing-season imagery and paucity of clear views. Assessment maps of Landsat 5-7 image quantities and qualities are presented that offer novel perspectives on the growing-season archive considered for this study. Over 150,000+ Landsat images were considered for the NAFD project. Optimally, one high quality cloud-free image in each year or a total of 12,152 images would be used. However, to accommodate data gaps and cloud/shadow contamination 23,338 images were needed. In 220 specific path-row image years no acceptable images were found resulting in data gaps in the annual national map products.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:1753-8947
1753-8955
DOI:10.1080/17538947.2016.1158876