Week 06 - More Raster & Remote Sensing
This week extends raster analysis into remote sensing, terrain-based movement modeling, sampling, interpolation, and commercial satellite imagery workflows. The materials emphasize how raster cells, bands, metadata, terrain, and processing choices affect the spatial questions students can ask.
This Week's Materials
- 00 - TURN IN - Basic Remote Sensing with Google Earth Engine:Sentinel-2band combinations, metadata, standalone spectral-index scripts, and a student-selected index exercise.
- 01 - TURN IN - Tobler's Hiker Function: Modeling Movement and Terrain-Based Distance: cost distance, slope, walking speed, and travel-time surfaces in Google Earth Engine.
- 02 - TURN IN - Sampling & Interpolation with QGIS: point sampling and interpolation concepts in QGIS.
- 03 - OPTIONAL - Introducing Planet.com Satellite Imagery: Planet imagery concepts and a companion SDK notebook workflow.
- 04 - OPTIONAL - Pan-Sharpen Landsat Imagery with HSV Color Transformation: Landsat true color, panchromatic imagery, and HSV pan sharpening in Google Earth Engine.
Remote Sensing With Earth Engine
The basic remote sensing lab introducesSentinel-2imagery in Google Earth Engine. Students filter imagery by date, bounds, and cloud metadata; compare standalone band-combination scripts for true color, color infrared, urban SWIR, and geology SWIR; calculate standalone spectral indices including NDVI, NBR, NDWI, NDMI, NDBI, BSI, and an iron oxide ratio; and adapt one index for a study area of their own choosing.
The lab examples are intentionally modular. Each Earth Engine code block can be pasted into a blank script and run independently, with map layers toggled off by default so students use the Layers widget to compare outputs one at a time.
Pan Sharpening With Landsat
The pan-sharpening lab introduces Landsat 8 TOA imagery and the relationship between 30-meter multispectral bands and the 15-meter panchromatic band. Students use an HSV color transformation to replace image brightness with panchromatic detail, then compare the original true color image, panchromatic band, and pan-sharpened output.
Movement Modeling With Earth Engine
The Tobler's Hiker Function lab uses terrain to model movement as travel time rather than straight-line distance. Students calculate slope from elevation, convert slope to walking speed, build a cost surface, and compare reachable areas from an origin point.
Planet SDK Notebook
The Planet.com workshop is supported by a Colab-oriented notebook:
The notebook uses data/lakelagunita.geojson as the area of interest and walks through SDK-based authentication, search, metadata filtering, footprint mapping, order creation, order monitoring, downloading, and NDVI visualization.