Analysis of Landsat-8 OLI imagery for land surface water mapping

The normalized difference water indices (NDWIs) were successfully used in map land surface water mapping (LSWM) from Landsat series multispectral images. This paper evaluates the potential of the recent Landsat satellite (Landsat-8) Operational Land Imager (OLI) multispectral images for LSWM using three NDWI models. We tested the accuracy and robustness of the three OLI NDWI models in the Yangtze River Basin and the Huaihe River Basin in China. The results demonstrate that the three OLI NDWI models achieve an overall accuracy of more than 95%, a kappa coefficient of 0.89 and a producer’s accuracy of 95% for LSWM. The results also demonstrate that the NDWI model using the green band (Band 3) and the SWIR1 band (Band 6) (referred to as NDWIO6,3) of the OLI sensor has a higher LSWM accuracy than the other two NDWI models.