Application of Multi-satellite Sensors to Estimate the Green-tide Area

The massive green tide occurred every summer in the Yellow Sea since 2008, and many studies are being actively conducted to estimate the coverage of green tide through analysis of satellite imagery. However, there is no satellite images selection criterion for accurate coverage calculation of green tide. Therefore, this study aimed to find a suitable satellite image from for the comparison of the green tide coverage according to the spatial resolution of satellite image. In this study, Landsat ETM+, MODIS and GOCI images were used to coverage estimation and its spatial resolution is 30, 250 and 500 m, respectively. Green tide pixels were classified based on the NDVI algorithm, the difference of the green tide coverage was compared with threshold value. In addition, we estimate the proportion of the green tide in one pixel through the Linear Spectral Unmixing (LSU) method, and the effect of the difference of green tide ratio on the coverage calculation were evaluated. The result of green tide coverage from the calculation of the NDVI value, coverage of green tide usually overestimate with decreasing spatial resolution, maximum difference shows 1.5 times. In addition, most of the pixels were included in the group with less than 0.1 (10%) LSU value, and above 0.5 (50%) LSU value accounted for about 2% in all of three images. Even though classified as green tide from the NDVI result, it is considered to be overestimated because it is regarded as the same coverage even if green tide is not 100% filled in one pixel. Mixed-pixel problem seems to be more severe with spatial resolution decreases.