Working with ArcGIS Pro and Reflectance (AT309 Week 10)

In this week of class, we started working with the software ArcGIS Pro and looking at maps with different characteristics. We started off by discussing reflectance bands for different colors, including Red Edge and Near Infrared (NIR) as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1- Reflectance bands including blue, green, red, red edge, and NIR

We then explored multiband composite rasters. We used the composite tool to take multiple single-band rasters and create a multiband raster. If satellite imagery is given in individual layers, you could use this tool to combine the layers.

We then started to adjust the RGB settings. This is where you assign a color to each band of reflectance. You can make it look realistic or edit the colors to be whatever you would like. We took a give picture of a forested area and adjusted these RGB settings by making Band 5 red, Band 3 green, and Band 2 blue. This changed it to look like Figure 2, where you can see the green areas are now pink.

Figure 2- Adjusted RGB

We could then edit the colors to reflect the NDVI which would show vegetation heath and give less shaded detail as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3- NDVI

Figure 4 shows another map with adjusted colors assigned to each band to make things more visible, like the burned fields in the green/brown color below.

Figure 4- Composite Raster