ESRI Landsat Explorer

DISCLAIMER:

Our lab assignment used to explore Landsat Explorer was made to use an outdated software from ESRI that is no longer around. As such the tabs asked to be explored in the assignment either do not exist, or do not contain sub menus that exist in Landsat Explorer. On top of this the stories/ bookmarks that we were asked to look into on the Lab are not in this software, which made it a little hard to finish the assignment as I had to bounce around. Lastly, for some reason a lot of the functionality of the application seems to be broken, such as the sliders in the flood of Allahabad section not working at all. There are times were the display does not show any masks or filters, making it impossible to understand the built in tutorials.

Color Infrared:

Figure 2: Color Infrared of Greater Lafayette Area

Color infrared in this exercise helps us identify where healthy vegetation is on the map. Color infrared on the Electromagnetic spectrum is from .70 micrometers to 1.0 micrometers. It is also known as false color photography, in a color infrared photograph (Look to Figure 2) vegetation shows up in shades of red. Healthy vegetation will show up in brighter shades of red, with urban areas or areas with little to no vegetation will show up in a sort of grayish cyan color.

Moisture Index and Vegetation Index:

Figure 3: Moisture Index Filter of Greater Lafayette Area

Figure 4: Vegetation Index of the Greater Lafayette Area

The two figures above show a how using different indexes and different band combinations can be used to show correlations from different factors. In figure 3 a moisture index is being displayed, with areas of light blue having a light amount of moisture, and areas with darker blues having heavier amounts of moisture. Figure 4 shows areas of vegetation, with areas of light yellow and green showing thin vegetation or grassland, with dark greens showing thick vegetation or trees, and orange showing areas of no vegetation or water. By comparing the two images above you can see how areas of high moisture have heavier vegetation.