The purpose of this lab exercise is to familiarize students with multispectral imagery data sources used in Earth Observation applications, with the creation of colour composite images, and the use of the WhiteboxTools software package for analyzing these data.

The following materials, combined with your textbook, can be used as background materials and to help in answering the assignment questions.

• Baumann, P.R. 2010. Landsat Program

• NASA Landsat Science

• European Space Agency 2015. Sentinel-2 User Handbook

• Lindsay, J.B. 2019. The WhiteboxTools User Manual

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: This series of lab assignments will require manipulation, analysis, and visualization of several remotely sensed images. We will be separating the image analysis and data visualization components. For manipulating and analyizing remotely sensed data we will use the WhiteboxTools advanced geospatial analysis platform¹. For data visualization, these labs do not assume any particular remote sensing software. You are free to use whatever software you are familiar with for visualizing the imagery data in the labs, including ArcGIS, Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools¹ (Whitebox GAT), QGIS, or any other spatial anlysis software capable of displaying georeferenced imagery data.

¹ In this series of lab assignments, WhiteboxTools refers to the standalone geospatial analysis library, a collection of tools contained within a compiled binary executable command-line program and the associated Python scripts that are distributed alongside the binary file (e.g. whitebox_tools.py and wb_runner.py). Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools and Whitebox GAT refer to the GIS/RS software, which includes a user-interface (front-end), point-and-click tool interfaces, and cartographic data visualization capabilities. Importantly, WhiteboxTools and Whitebox GAT are related but separate projects.

The computers in the Geography Undergraduate Computing Lab (Hutt 236), have ArcGIS and Whitebox GAT installed (IDRISI may possibly be installed as well). If you are planning to carry out these assignments on your own computer, then it is important that you have WhiteboxTools installed along with one of the data visualization packages described above. WhiteboxTools is open-source, freely available, and works on Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems. It can be downloaded from here. Instructions on setting up and using WhiteboxTools can be found in the WhiteboxTools User Manual and you are advised to look over these materials before starting this lab.

In addition to the software, you will need to download the data associated with this lab exercise from the CourseLink page under the Lab 1 directory. The data for this laboratory is quite large and will require substantial data storage. It is advisable that you purchase a USB flash drive to dedicate to this course and to serve as the data backup. It is important that you backup all of the data for the lab assignment.

You will hand in a printed report summarizing the answer to each of the questions in the following exercise along with the necessary colour images. Notice that you will need to have paid your lab fee to have printing privileges in the Hutt building computer labs.