ABSTRACT
There is a great variety of airborne and spaceborne platforms and instruments to monitor environmental systems remotely. This includes providing images of the land or ocean for specific purposes as needed, for example by airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles, as well as repetitive collection of imagery of the same area, for example by satellites orbiting the Earth. This chapter focuses on the use of Landsat imagery responding to electromagnetic reflection and absorption of sunlight by land, soil, vegetation, and surface water. For this purpose, this chapter describes major platforms, reference systems, bands, analysis using indices, such as normalized difference indices for vegetation and water, reclassification, and the use of multivariate analysis and machine learning to perform image classification.
