DEA Water Observations Statistics (Landsat) Version 2.0.0

Australia-wide statistics on surface water observations derived from Landsat satellite imagery between 1986 and 2025. The data, produced by Geoscience Australia, provides per-pixel counts of clear observations and water detections at a 30-meter resolution. It includes annual, seasonal, and multi-year summaries of water frequency.

Use Cases

• Modeling long-term surface water trends based on multi-year water frequency statistics.
• Analyzing seasonal water patterns (wet/dry seasons) using the November-March and April-October summaries.
• Assessing annual variability in water presence using the calendar year statistics.
• Mapping areas of persistent or ephemeral water based on the ratio of wet to clear observations.

Strengths

• Long temporal coverage spanning 40 years from 1986 to 2025.
• High spatial resolution of 30 meters by 30 meters for all of Australia.
• Provides multiple temporal aggregations: full time-series, per calendar year, and per seasonal period.

Limitations

• No confidence filtering is applied, making the product susceptible to noise from input classification errors.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Generated from the DEA Water Observations from Space (WOfS) suite of products using Landsat satellite observations.

Time Range

1986 to 2025

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-25 21:12:17.600926

Geography

All Australia