Thematic Mapper Data Quality and Performance Assessment in Renewable Resources/agriculture Remote Sensing

It is believed that the increased spatial resolution will provide solutions to proportion estimation error due to mixed pixels, and the increased spectral resolution will provide for the identification of important agricultural features such as crop stage, and condition. The results of analyses conducted relative to these hypothesis from sample segments extracted from the 4-band Detroit scene and the 7-band Mississippi County, Arkansas engineering test scene are described. Several studies were conducted to evaluate the geometric and radiometric performance of the TM to determine data viability for the more pertinent investigations of TM utility. In most cases this requirement was more than sufficiently satisfied. This allowed the opportunity to take advantage of detailed ground observations for several of the sample segments to assess class separability and detection of other important features with TM. The results presented regarding these TM characteristics show that not only is the increased definition of the within scene variance captured by the increased spatial and spectral resolution, but that the mid-IR bands (5 and 7) are necessary for optimum crop type classification. Both qualitative and quantitative results are presented that describe the improvements gained with the TM both relative to the MSS and on its own merit.