Amazon River mainstem floodplain Landsat TM digital mosaic

This paper presents the methodology used to build a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) digital mosaic for the Amazon River mainstem floodplain. Twenty-nine almost cloud-free TM Landsat scenes covering a period from 1985 to 1995 were selected from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) archive. Most of the scenes were acquired from July to September, a period that begins with high waters and ends with receding water up to about the beginning of the low waters. Radiometric rectification was applied to the images to reduce variability of environmental conditions during Landsat TM data acquisition. The radiometric rectification applied had a good performance for bands 3, 5, and 7, for most of the scenes. For bands 1 and 2 the radiometric rectification was limited, especially for scenes with intense haze. Nevertheless, the overall performance of radiometric normalization allowed the production of a uniform dataset for the entire Brazilian Amazon River mainstem floodplain.