Cold Lake Oil Sands Land Cover Quality Evaluation from 2009 Landsat

2009 Landsat imagery was processed by the Government of Alberta to create a quality evaluation dataset for the Cold Lake oil sands region. It identifies pixels potentially misclassified due to sensor noise, clouds, haze, or cloud shadows. The data supports the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan's science-based monitoring objectives.

Use Cases

• Identify 'bad pixels' flagged with value '1' due to cloud cover for data cleaning prior to analysis.
• Assess the impact of sensor noise and haze on land cover classification accuracy within Townships 56-69.
• Evaluate cumulative environmental effects by filtering out low-quality imagery areas from time-series studies.
• Support the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan's monitoring by validating base imagery used for ecosystem characterization.

Strengths

• Covers a defined geographic area: Townships 56 to 69, Ranges 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian.
• Targets specific quality issues: sensor noise, cloud, haze, and cloud shadow.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (2009), limiting temporal analysis and current condition assessment.
• Specific metrics on data volume (e.g., image count, resolution) and validation accuracy are not provided.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2009 Landsat satellite imagery.

Time Range

2009

Freshness

null

Geography

Cold Lake oil sands area, Alberta, Canada (Lower Athabasca region).