Landsat ETM plus mosaic of northern Canada

Mapping northern Canada with medium spatial resolution (30 m) Landsat data is important to complement national multiagency activities in forested and agricultural regions, and thus to achieve full Canadian coverage. Northern mapping presents unique challenges due to limited availability of field data for calibration or class labeling. Additional problems are caused by variability between individual Landsat scenes acquired under different atmospheric conditions and at different times. Therefore, the generation of radiometrically consistent coverage is highly desirable to reduce the amount of reference data required for land cover mapping and to increase mapping efficiency and consistency by stabilizing spectra of land cover classes among hundreds of Landsat scenes. The production chain and dataset of a normalized, 90 m resolution Landsat enhanced thematic mapper plus (ETM+) mosaic of northern Canada is presented in this research note. A robust regression technique called Thiel-Sen (TS) is used to normalize Landsat scenes to consistent coarse-resolution VEGETATION (VGT) imagery. The derived dataset is available for any interested user and can be employed in applications aimed at studying processes in the Canadian Arctic regions above the tree line.