The Cold Lake oil sands area - Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian, falls within the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP). As part of Alberta’s Land-use Framework, LARP was developed in 2012 to set the stage for robust growth, vibrant communities and a healthy environment within the region. One of its implementation objectives is to balance the economic development of oil sands and impacts on the ecosystem and environment. This is to be achieved through an enhanced science-based monitoring for improved characterization of the environment and to collect the information necessary to understand cumulative effects.
This quality evaluation dataset was produced for 2011 Landsat data to identify possible misclassified areas due to sensor noise, cloud, haze, and cloud shadow. These areas are assigned to ‘bad pixels’ or value ‘1’ in the quality evaluation dataset.
Process steps performed in ENVI 5.1 to produce this quality evaluation dataset:
1. Pre-release versions of annual Landsat Best Available Pixel Composite (LBAPC) datasets (1984 to 2012) were obtained from the Natural Resources Canada/Pacific Forestry Centre for testing purposes. Of these, the 2011 LBAPC was used to produce this data quality evaluation.
2. The presence of cloud, haze, cloud shadow, and noise in certain areas of the 2011 LBAPC scene can cause misclassification of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) types in the final result. Therefore, pixel values in these areas were manually assigned ‘1’ and are classified as ‘bad pixels’. Pixel values in remaining areas were assigned ‘0’ and are classified as ‘good pixels’.