Cold Lake Oil Sands Landsat Quality Evaluation for 2005

Landsat imagery from 2005 was processed to identify misclassified pixels due to sensor noise, clouds, haze, and shadows in the Cold Lake oil sands region. The Government of Alberta created this dataset to support science-based monitoring under the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan. It assigns a 'bad pixel' label with value '1' to problematic areas.

Use Cases

• Validate Landsat classification accuracy by filtering out pixels labeled as 'bad pixels' (value '1').
• Assess the impact of atmospheric conditions like cloud and haze on land cover mapping in Township 56 to 69.
• Improve cumulative effects modeling by using the quality layer to exclude sensor noise and cloud shadow areas from analysis.

Strengths

• Focuses on a specific, environmentally significant region: the Cold Lake oil sands area.
• Provides a direct quality metric ('bad pixels') for a single, consistent year (2005).

Limitations

• The dataset is temporally limited, covering only imagery from 2005.
• The specific number of images or pixel count is unknown.
• The data format (TIFF, XML, HTML) may require specialized geospatial software for analysis.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2005 Landsat imagery to identify misclassified areas.

Time Range

2005

Freshness

null

Geography

Cold Lake oil sands area, Alberta, Canada (Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian).