National ASTER geoscience map

Since the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) was launched in 1999, the sensor has acquired an extensive coverage of the Earth’s surface. The ASTER archive has great potential for a variety of regional and continental scale studies. ASTER is particularly useful for geological applications and provides the potential to derive continental scale surface mineral abundance and composition maps providing a new and valuable information source for the resource exploration industry.

An initiative to produce one such set of continental scale surface mineral abundance and composition maps for Australia from ASTER L1B VNIR, SWIR radiance at sensor data and ASTER L2 surface emissivity data was undertaken. The project successfully solved a number of technical challenges. All together, ~3600 ASTER L1B radiance at sensor scenes and L2 surface emissivity scenes were selected from the potential ~35,000 scenes from the USGS LPDAAC archive covering the Australian continent. The processing and calibration methodology, which was developed to generate continental-scale mosaics of reflectance and emissivity from ASTER’s nine reflected and five
emitted bands, is described in Cacetta et al. (2013). Brief example descriptions of the ASTER-derived geoscience products are given in “Australian ASTER Geoscience Product Notes FINALx”.

Continental mosaic of ASTER L1B data before (a) and after (b) cross calibration showing ASTER bands 7, 4 and 1 displayed in red, green and blue respectively.

References:

Caccetta, M., Collings, S., Cudahy, T.J., 2013. A calibration methodology for continental scale mapping using ASTER imagery. Remote Sens. Environ. 139, 306–317.

Cudahy, T., Caccetta, M., Thomas, M., Hewson, R., Abrams, M., Kato, M., Kashimura, O., Ninomiya, Y., Yamaguchi, Y., Collings, S., Laukamp, C., Ong, C., Lau, I., Rodger, A., Chia, J., Warren, P., Woodcock, R., Fraser, R., Rankine, T., Vote, J., de Caritat, P., English, P., Meyer, D., Doescher, C., Fu, B., Shi, P., Mitchell, R. (2016): Satellite-derived mineral mapping and monitoring of weathering, deposition and erosion.- Nature Scientific Reports, 6, 23702

Duuring, P., Hagemann, S., Novikova, Y., Cudahy, T., Laukamp, C. (2012): Targeting iron ore in banded iron formation using ASTER data: Weld Range greenstone belt, Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia.- Economic Geology, 107, 585-597.

Lampinen, H., Laukamp, C., Occhipinti, S., Metelka, V., Spinks, S.C. (2017): Delineating Alteration Footprints from Field and ASTER SWIR Spectra, Geochemistry and Gamma-Ray Spectrometry above Regolith Covered Base Metal Deposits – an Example from Abra, Western Australia.- Economic Geology, 112, 1977-2003.

Laukamp, C., Salama, W., González-Álvarez, I. (2015): Proximal and remote spectroscopic characterisation of regolith in the Albany-Fraser Orogen (Western Australia).- Ore Geology Reviews, 73 (3), 540-554.