Utilization of multispectral landsat-8 remote sensing data for lithological mapping of southwestern Saudi Arabia

• Main Authors: Habes Ghrefat, Ali Y. Kahal, Kamal Abdelrahman, Hussain J. Alfaifi, Saleh Qaysi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-06-01
• Series: Journal of King Saud University: Science
• Subjects: Landsat 8; Mapping; Image transform; Saudi Arabia; Spectral measurements; Reflectance
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1018364721000756

The upper plutonic rocks in southwestern Saudi Arabia has been mapped through Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) data. The gathered field rock samples were subjected to spectral measurements (in the range of 0.4–2.5 µm) in the laboratory using a GER 3700 spectroradiometer. Integrated remote sensing techniques, including the band ratio, principal component analysis (PCA), and Gram-Schmidt spectral sharpening have been applied through this study. The red–greenblue composites of the pan-sharpened original bands (3, 4, and 7), principal components (PC3, PC1, and PC2), and band ratios 5/6 and 5/7 were found to be the most useful to delineate the study area’s Upper Proterozoic plutonic rocks. The results of image processing methods, spectral reflectance analyses are in good agreement with the field data. The spectral reflectance curves of the collected samples and the corresponding Landsat 8 pixels match well. It is indicated that Landsat-8 image data has great capability to identify lithological units and could be applicable in several areas in arid and semiarid environments.