Extraction of Non-Point Pollution Using Satellite Imagery Data

Land cover map is a typical GIS database which shows the Earth's physical surface differentiated by standardized homogeneous land cover types. Satellite images acquired by Landsat TM were primarily used to produce a land cover map of 7 land cover classes; however, it now becomes to produce a more accurate land cover classification dataset of 23 classes thanks to higher resolution satellite images, such as SPOT-5 and IKONOS. The use of the newly produced high resolution land cover map of 23 classes for such activities to estimate non-point sources of pollution like water pollution modeling and atmospheric dispersion modeling is expected to result a higher level of accuracy and validity in various environmental monitoring results. The estimation of pollution from non-point sources using GIS-based modeling with land cover dataset shows fairly accurate and consistent results.