A New Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) Method for Quantitative Water Fraction Derivation and Evaluation With EOS/MODIS and Landsat/TM Data

A quantitative method is developed for deriving water fraction from coarse- to medium-resolution satellite data with visible to short-wave infrared (SWIR) channels based on the linear mixture theory. The method uses a SWIR channel (1.64 μm) by assuming that the water-surface-leaving radiance in this channel is insignificant and is thus less affected by water types and water depth than near-infrared (NIR) channels for inland water bodies. For a mixed water pixel, a dynamic nearest neighbor searching (DNNS) method is used to find the nearby land pixels to determine the average land reflectance. The nearby pure water pixels with a similar water type to the subpixel water portion of the mixed water pixel are found dynamically to derive the average water reflectance. The average reflectance in the SWIR channel from both pure land pixels and water pixels is used to calculate the water fraction from a linear mixture model. The developed method is applied to Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and shows promising results. High-resolution satellite data from the Thematic Mapper (TM) are used to evaluate the water fraction derived from MODIS. During pixel-to-pixel water fraction evaluation, TM data are spatially aggregated to MODIS resolution. When evaluated against the high-resolution TM observations, water fractions derived from MODIS using the DNNS method with the SWIR channel show a bias of -0.021 with a standard deviation of 0.0338. Comparing lake areas between TM and MODIS data also shows consistent results with the pixel-to-pixel water fraction comparison. The DNNS method is also compared to the traditional histogram method both with SWIR channel and NIR channel. The results show that the DNNS method is more accurate than the histogram method and that the SWIR channel is better than the NIR channel to derive highly accurate water fraction from coarse- to medium-resolution satellite data.