The past two posts for Special Topics have focused on the preparation and analysis of Mountaintop Removal (MTR) areas located around the Appalachian Mountain chain in the mid East United States. The analysis culminated in the report here for the Group 3 area. The overall purpose of the report is too compare 2005 MTR measurements provided by Skytruth.org to an internal study by UWF of 2010 available imagery.
The last post outlined the reclassification of the Landsat rasters for a particular area and here we are looking at the fruits of that labor. The group 3 analysis team, lead and coordinated by myself combined data for two Landsat areas and then eliminated areas of noise and interference. The noise and interference refer to areas that show similar spectral signatures to MTR sites. River erosion, urbanization, agricultural clearing, and roadways can all show similar reflectance to MTR sights. As such these areas were attempted to be removed by discounting areas within 400m of rivers, 400m of highways, and 50m of small streams and roads. One key area of interference remained afterward which was clouds on the imagery. When reclassified some of these areas could not be cleared away and left some false positive MTR sites. These have been highlighted on the map below, and likely account for the inaccuracy described on the map.
The map above is based around the two combined Landsat Raster images which were used to derive the MTR sites through unsupervised reclassification during the analysis phase. These are overlayed on the 2005 identified sites. With the exception of the areas in the north west explained on the image the data supports that there is an overall decline in MTR activity. This is likely as a result of being on the western edge of the study area as whole with MTR progressively moving eastward into more rich regions of the US coal fields. These fields arent depicted here. However this blog entry, and associated map are only one part of the project as a whole. There is other analysis and conclusions drawn as a part of this project at the following link: http://arcg.is/1Yxokr7 . This is an ArcGIS Online Story Map Journal dedicated to this project. Overlayed there with this data on the analysis tab is a depiction of the coal fields. I invite you to look at the more indepth discussion on this analysis and MTR activity through the jounal. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment