Exposed soil and mineral map of the Australian continent revealing the land at its barest.

ABSTRACT: Multi-spectral remote sensing has already played an important role in mapping surface mineralogy. However, vegetation - even when relatively sparse - either covers the underlying substrate or modifies its spectral response, making it difficult to resolve diagnostic mineral spectral features. Here we take advantage of the petabyte-scale Landsat datasets covering the same areas for periods exceeding 30 years combined with a novel high-dimensional statistical technique to extract a noise-reduced, cloud-free, and robust estimate of the spectral response of the barest state (i.e. least vegetated) across the whole continent of Australia at 25 m² resolution. Importantly, our method preserves the spectral relationships between different wavelengths of the spectra. This means that our fr

SUBMITTER: Roberts D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6874580 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature