DEA Tasseled Cap Percentiles (Landsat)

Version:: 2.0.0
Type:: Derivative, Raster
Resolution:: 30 m
Coverage:: 1987 to 2023
Data updates:: Yearly frequency, Ongoing

Overview

About

Tasseled Cap percentiles provide an annual summary of how the environment has varied through a year. The Tasseled Cap percentiles provide the upper, lower and middle conditions as described by the 90th, 10th and 50th percentiles respectively, of greenness, wetness and brightness across the landscape.

These percentiles are intended for use as inputs into classification algorithms to identify such environmental features as wetlands and groundwater dependent ecosystems, and characterise salt flats, clay pans, salt lakes and coastal land forms.

This version includes breaking changes

All tile grid references have been changed to refer to a new origin point. Learn more in the Version 2.0.0 changelog.

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For help accessing the data, see the Access tab.

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Data sources

DEA Tasseled Cap Calendar Year Percentiles - NCI

Data sources

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Key specifications

For more specifications, see the Specifications tab.

Technical name	Geoscience Australia Tasseled Cap Percentiles Collection 3
Bands	9 bands of data (wet_pc_10, wet_pc_50, and more)
Catalogue ID	149765
Currency	See currency and the latest and next update dates
Parent product	Landsat 5, 7, 8 and 9 NBART and Observational Attributes
Collection	Geoscience Australia Landsat Collection 3
Tags	geoscience_australia_landsat_collection_3, tasseled_cap, wetlands, groundwater, salt_flats, statistics
Licence	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

Cite this product

Data citation

Geoscience Australia, 2023. DEA Tasseled Cap Percentiles (Landsat, Provisional). Geoscience Australia, Canberra.

Publications

Crist, E. P. (1985). A TM Tasseled Cap equivalent transformation for reflectance factor data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 17(3), 301–306. https://doi.org/10.1016/0034-4257(85)90102-6

Description

Background

The Tasseled Cap (Kauth–Thomas) transformation takes satellite imagery and shows the degree of greenness, wetness and brightness across the observed area. These indexes help users understand the combinations of vegetation, water and bare areas respectively. As such the Tasseled Cap is a useful input into environmental analyses, especially where there are mixtures of all three features in the landscape, such as in wetlands.

What this product offers

This product offers three percentiles per Tasseled Cap index per year. The percentiles are 10th, 50th, and 90th; the Tasseled Cap indexes are ‘greenness’, ‘wetness’, and ‘brightness’; and the years are 1987 to the latest full calendar year.

It is useful in broad environmental analyses where it is desirable to understand a mixed landscape including vegetation, water and bare areas, and as such is useful for wetlands analyses.

It includes cloud and shadow buffering with a size of 6 pixels. This buffering is applied to Landsat 5, Landsat 7, Landsat 8, and Landsat 9 data from 2022 onwards.

Data description

Tasseled Cap percentiles are created by bringing together all individual satellite images for a year and generating the corresponding Tasseled Cap for each, before computing the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of their respective data ranges. The percentiles are chosen to represent minimum, middle and maximum (or general) conditions for each index per year, for every 30m x 30m pixel across Australia.

It includes cloud and shadow buffering with a size of 6 pixels and includes Landsat 5, Landsat 7, Landsat 8, and Landsat 9 (from 2022 onwards).

Applications

This product provides valuable discrimination for characterising:

Vegetated wetlands
Salt flats
Salt lakes
Coastal land cover classes

Technical information

The Tasseled Cap (Kauth–Thomas) transform translates the six spectral bands of Landsat into a three indexes describing greenness, wetness and brightness.  These indexes can be used to help understand complex ecosystems, such as wetlands or groundwater dependent ecosystems. The Tasseled Cap Percentiles capture how the greenness, wetness and brightness of the landscape behaves over time.

The percentiles are well suited to characterising wetlands, salt flats/salt lakes and coastal ecosystems. However, care should be applied when analysing these indexes, as soil colour and fire scars can cause misleading results. In areas of high relief caused by cliffs or steep terrain, terrain shadows can cause erroneous results.

The 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the Tasseled Cap are intended to capture the extreme (10th and 90th percentile) values and long-term average (50th percentile) values of each index.  Percentiles are used in preference to minimum, maximum and mean, as the min/max/mean statistical measures are more sensitive to undetected cloud/cloud shadow, and can be misleading for non-normally distributed data.

The Tasseled Cap Percentiles are intended to complement the DEA Water Observations (Water Observations from Space) and Fractional Cover algorithms. DEA WO is designed to discriminate open water, but the Tasseled Cap wetness index identifies areas of water and areas where water and vegetation are mixed together; i.e. mangroves and palustrine wetlands. Similarly Fractional Cover describes proportions of green, brown and bare areas in the landscape, and hence the Fractional Cover percentiles can be used in complement to the Tasseled Cap percentiles.

However if you are interested in terrestrial vegetation (where water in the pixel is not a factor), use the Fractional Cover product in preference to the Tasseled Cap, which provides a better biophysical characterisation of green vegetation fraction, dry vegetation fraction and bare soil vegetation fraction.

We used the Tasseled Cap transforms described in Crist et al. (1985).

Lineage

The lineage of this product is inherited from its sole input, the terrain corrected surface reflectance product Surface Reflectance NBART Collection 3 (Landsat).

References

Crist, E. P. (1985). A TM Tasseled Cap equivalent transformation for reflectance factor data. Remote Sensing of Environment, 17(3), 301–306. https://doi.org/10.1016/0034-4257(85)90102-6

Quality

Accuracy

As an index, this product does not possess any inherent accuracy separate from the accuracy of the input surface reflectance data.

In terms of limitations, caution should be used, especially with the Tasseled Cap wetness index results in areas where residual terrain shadow, or dark soils can cause high ‘wetness’ index values.

One of the limitations of using the Tasseled Cap wetness index is that it will identify all ‘wet’ things, including potential wetlands, groundwater dependent ecosystems, irrigated crops/pasture, man-made water storages and sewerage treatment, and does not discriminate between these. As such it should be used in conjunction with other contextual data to ensure that features identified using the Tasseled Cap Wetness Percentiles are features of interest rather than false positives.

Specifications

Bands

Bands are distinct layers of data within a product that can be loaded using the Open Data Cube (on the DEA Sandbox or NCI) or DEA’s STAC API. Here are the bands of the product: ga_ls_tc_pc_cyear_3.

	Aliases	Resolution	No-data	Units	Type	Description
wet_pc_10	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Wetness - 10th percentile.
wet_pc_50	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Wetness - 50th percentile.
wet_pc_90	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Wetness - 90th percentile.
green_pc_10	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Greenness - 10th percentile.
green_pc_50	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Greenness - 50th percentile.
green_pc_90	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Greenness - 90th percentile.
bright_pc_10	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Brightness - 10th percentile.
bright_pc_50	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Brightness - 50th percentile.
bright_pc_90	-	30 m	-9999	Percent	int16	Brightness - 90th percentile.

Product information

This metadata provides general information about the product.

Product ID	ga_ls_tc_pc_cyear_3	Used to load data from the Open Data Cube.
Short name	DEA Tasseled Cap Percentiles (Landsat)	The name that is commonly used to refer to the product.
Technical name	Geoscience Australia Tasseled Cap Percentiles Collection 3	The full technical name that refers to the product and its specific provider, sensors, and collection.
Version	2.0.0	The version number of the product. See the History tab.
Lineage type	Derivative	Derivative products are derived from other products.
Spatial type	Raster	Raster data consists of a grid of pixels.
Spatial resolution	30 m	The size of the pixels in the raster.
Temporal coverage	1987 to 2023	The time span for which data is available.
Update frequency	Yearly	The expected frequency of data updates. Also called ‘Temporal resolution’.
Update activity	Ongoing	The activity status of data updates.
Currency	See the Currency Report	Currency is a measure based on data publishing and update frequency.
Latest and next update dates	See the Currency Report	See Table B of the report.
Catalogue ID	149765	The Data and Publications catalogue (eCat) ID.
Licence	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence	See the Credits tab.

Product categorisation

This metadata describes how the product relates to other DEA products.

Parent product	Landsat 5, 7, 8 and 9 NBART and Observational Attributes
Collection	Geoscience Australia Landsat Collection 3
Tags	geoscience_australia_landsat_collection_3, tasseled_cap, wetlands, groundwater, salt_flats, statistics

Access

Access the data

DEA Maps	See it on a map	Learn how to use DEA Maps.
DEA Explorer	Explore data availability	Learn how to use the DEA Explorer.
Data sources	DEA Tasseled Cap Calendar Year Percentiles - AWS DEA Tasseled Cap Calendar Year Percentiles - NCI	Learn how to access the data via AWS.
Web services	Get via web service	Learn how to use DEA’s web services.

History

Version history

Versions are numbered using the Semantic Versioning scheme (Major.Minor.Patch). Note that this list may include name changes and predecessor products.

v2.0.0	-	Current version
v2.0.0	of	DEA Wetness Percentiles (Landsat)
v1.0.0	of	DEA Tasseled Cap Percentiles (Landsat)

Changelog

Version 2.0.0

Breaking change: Shift in grid origin point — The south-west origin point of the DEA Summary Product Grid has been shifted 18 tiles west and 15 tiles south. Therefore, all tile grid references have been changed. For instance, a tile reference of x10y10 has changed to x28y25. The tile grid references of all derivative products generated from 2024 onwards will also be changed; however, Analysis Ready Data products will not be affected.
Enhanced cloud masking to reduce noise — An enhancement to cloud masking has reduced cloud and shadow noise. This enhancement (known as ‘cloud buffering’) involved cleaning cloud masks using a 6-pixel dilation on cloud and shadows. Note that some areas of very high surface reflectance (e.g. sand dunes and ocean areas) may exhibit worsened noise or data gaps, but these are infrequent occurrences with low impact.
Landsat 9 product — Landsat 9 is processed from 2022 onwards.

Credits

License and copyright

Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.