Surface water mapping from suomi NPP-VIIRS imagery at 30 m resolution via blending with landsat data

Chang Huang, Yun Chen, Shiqiang Zhang, Linyi Li, Kaifang Shi, Rui Liu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

40 Citations (Scopus)
24 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Monitoring the dynamics of surface water using remotely sensed data generally requires both high spatial and high temporal resolutions. One effective and popular approach for achieving this is image fusion. This study adopts a widely accepted fusion model, the Enhanced Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (ESTARFM), for blending the newly available coarse-resolution Suomi NPP-VIIRS data with Landsat data in order to derive water maps at 30 m resolution. The Pan-sharpening technique was applied to preprocessing NPP-VIIRS data to achieve a higher-resolution before blending. The modified Normalized Difference Water Index (mNDWI) was employed for mapping surface water area. Two fusion alternatives, blend-then-index (BI) or index-then-blend (IB), were comparatively analyzed against a Landsat derived water map. A case study of mapping Poyang Lake in China, where water distribution pattern is complex and the water body changes frequently and drastically, was conducted. It has been revealed that the IB method derives more accurate results with less computation time than the BI method. The BI method generally underestimates water distribution, especially when the water area expands radically. The study has demonstrated the feasibility of blending NPP-VIIRS with Landsat for achieving surface water mapping at both high spatial and high temporal resolutions. It suggests that IB is superior to BI for water mapping in terms of efficiency and accuracy. The finding of this study also has important reference values for other blending works, such as image blending for vegetation cover monitoring.

Original languageEnglish
Article number631
Pages (from-to)1-14
Number of pages14
JournalRemote Sensing
Volume8
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Externally publishedYes

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