Water extraction technique in mountainous areas from satellite images

Abstract

Water monitoring is an important part of water resource management and has become an essential aspect of remote sensing. A number of indices have been developed for water extraction using satellite images. Even though all indices can extract the extent of a water body, none can do so without including a noise component, such as topographic shadows, cloud shadows, snow, ice, and buildup areas, all of which have spectrally similar characteristics under certain circumstances. In order to select the best index for water body extraction, several water indices have been compared. This paper proposes a method for extracting water bodies called the water extraction surface temperature index (WESTI). This method uses normalized difference water index (NDWI) and land surface temperature to eliminate the noise components, especially in mountainous and cold areas where other indices have very low accuracy. The results have shown that WESTI improves the NDWI results by removing more than 80% of topographic shadows, with an overall accuracy of 99% in all cases