Landsat-Based Quality Evaluation for Cold Lake Oil Sands Area

2010 Landsat imagery was processed to identify misclassified pixels in Alberta's Cold Lake oil sands region. The dataset flags 'bad pixels' affected by sensor noise, cloud, haze, and cloud shadow with a value of '1'. It was produced by the Government of Alberta to support science-based environmental monitoring under the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan.

Use Cases

• Masking out cloud-contaminated pixels from 2010 Landsat analysis using the 'bad pixel' flag.
• Assessing sensor noise patterns in historical imagery over the oil sands region.
• Improving land cover classification accuracy by excluding areas flagged by the quality evaluation layer.
• Supporting cumulative effects studies by providing a cleaned base layer for 2010 environmental characterization.

Strengths

• Focus on a single year (2010) for consistent temporal analysis.
• Explicit identification of common remote sensing artifacts (cloud, haze, sensor noise).
• Produced by a government authority (Government of Alberta) for regional planning.

Limitations

• Data is limited to a single year (2010), offering no multi-temporal trend analysis.
• Spatial coverage is restricted to a specific Alberta region (Townships 56-69, Ranges 1-11).
• The underlying classification method and validation details are not provided.

Provenance

Source

Government of Alberta

Collection Method

Derived from 2010 Landsat imagery.

Time Range

2010

Freshness

null

Geography

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