Chinese researchers undertake impervious surface mapping

BEIJING -- Chinese researchers have generated a global 30-meter impervious surface map with high accuracy.

The amount of impervious surface is an important indicator in monitoring the intensity of human activities and environmental changes. The use of remote sensing techniques is crucial to undertake global mapping of impervious surfaces covering large areas.

Previous mapping strategies relying on optical and radar data can hardly distinguish the impervious surface from others, while architecture, glass, asphalt and sand influence the spectral reflectance of an impervious surface.

Researchers from the Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences derived the global impervious and non-impervious training samples and generated an accurate global impervious surface map at a resolution of 30 meters for 2015 based on multi-source multi-temporal remote sensing datasets.

The research collected more than 10,000 samples from all over the world and conducted verification by comparing with other five global 30 meter impervious surface products.

The results showed that impervious surface mapping product had 95.1 percent accuracy.

Their research article was published in the journal Earth System Science Data.