by kevin_butler on July 24, 2013

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Landsat 8 has been online for a couple of months now, and the images look incredible. While all of thebands from previous Landsat missions are still incorporated, there are a couple of new ones, such as thecoastal blue band water penetration/aerosol detection and the cirrus cloud band for cloud masking andother applications. Heres a rundown of some common band combinations applied to Landsat 8,displayed as a red, green, blue (RGB):

Natural Color 4 3 2

False Color (urban) 7 6 4Color Infrared (vegetation) 5 4 3Agriculture 6 5 2

Atmospheric Penetration 7 6 5

Healthy Vegetation 5 6 2

Land/Water 5 6 4

Natural With Atmospheric Removal 7 5 3

Shortwave Infrared 7 5 4

Vegetation Analysis 6 5 4

Heres how the new bands from Landsat 8 line up with Landsat 7:

Landsat 7 Landsat 8

Band Name Bandwidth (m) Resolution (m) Band Name Bandwidth (m)Band 1 Coastal 0.43 0.45

Band 1 Blue 0.45 0.52 30 Band 2 Blue 0.45 0.51

Band 2 Green 0.52 0.60 30 Band 3 Green 0.53 0.59

Band 3 Red 0.63 0.69 30 Band 4 Red 0.64 0.67

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Band 4 NIR 0.77 0.90 30 Band 5 NIR 0.85 0.88

Band 5 SWIR 1 1.55 1.75 30 Band 6 SWIR 1 1.57 1.65

Band 7 SWIR 2 2.09 2.35 30 Band 7 SWIR 2 2.11 2.29

Band 8 Pan 0.52 0.90 15 Band 8 Pan 0.50 0.68

Band 9 Cirrus 1.36 1.38

Band 6 TIR 10.40 12.50 30/60 Band 10 TIRS 1 10.6 11.19

Band 11 TIRS 2 11.5 12.51

For the most part, the bands line up with what were used to, with some minor tweaking of the spectralranges. The thermal infrared band from Landsat 7 is now split into two bands for Landsat 8. Whereasbefore you had one thermal band that was acquired at 60 m resolution (and resampled to 30 m) now youhave increased spectral resolution at the cost of spatial resolution. It wouldnt be remote sensing withouttradeoffs, right?

July 27, 2013 at 11:51 pm

franzpc says:Do you know if I can make a DEM with Band 8 Pan? How to Thanks

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July 29, 2013 at 7:44 am

kevin_butler says:Short answer is no. Landsat would have to have a forward and backward looking band to generate a stereo image for dem purposes.All of its bands are at nadir. Check out Aster (30 m globally) or SRTM (90 m globally).

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July 29, 2013 at 8:19 am

joabelb says:Hi Kevin. First of all congratulations for this excellent post.I would like to know if ESRI is planning to release a basemap of Landsat 8 images (time enabled).I just saw something like that in this website http://landsatlook.usgs.gov/ . It would be awesome to have this basemap on my ArcGISDesktoptks

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July 29, 2013 at 8:38 am

kevin_butler says:Thankslooks like its coming soon. Might be a question of getting enough quality passes, although thats just speculation on my part.Heres a blog post from Jack (4th paragraph talks about what youre asking for).

http://blogs.esri.com/esri/esri-insider/2013/06/13/understanding-our-world-with-landsat-data-and-arcgis/

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July 30, 2013 at 10:35 am

alexanderwandl says:Hi Kevin,I have a question concerning the calculation of the NDVI. switching the bands 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 in the image analyses extension doesntprovide reasonable results, any advice?ThanksAlex

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July 30, 2013 at 11:42 am

kevin_butler says:Hi Alex,

I think youve identified the normalized difference builtup index. Urban areas/impervious surfaces should pop out when you use thatindex. Theres a blog from a couple of weeks ago about it.

http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2013/07/03/leveraging-ndvi-to-calculate-other-indices-in-image-analysis-window/

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July 30, 2013 at 11:42 am

kevin_butler says:Thats assuming youre using landsat 7 or landsat 5.

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September 12, 2013 at 8:39 am

horizonsweb says:How can I combine the Landsat 8 bands in ArcGIS 10.1?

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September 12, 2013 at 9:00 am

kevin_butler says:If youre working with one Landsat scene, load all of the bands onto your map. From the Image Analysis Window, select all of them andthen click the composite bands function in the processing pane.If you have multiple scenes, the easiest way to do this without scripting anything is to create a mosaic dataset of each band and thenuse composite bands on each of the mosaic datasets.

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February 13, 2014 at 9:01 am

William says:Hello

May I ask what is the best band combination to display a scene where the land cover includes forest, bare soil, crops and urban areas

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February 18, 2014 at 10:41 am

kevin_butler says:If the true color composite doesnt work for you, I would try something along the lines of 7 6 4. Bands 2 or 3 could also work in the blueband. If the vegetation isnt sufficiently highlighted, try switching the green band from 6 to 5.

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April 7, 2014 at 10:03 pm

naveenjayanna says:How to Layer Stack Landsat 8 bands

plz respond soon

Thank you

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April 8, 2014 at 9:05 am

kevin_butler says:Ask and you shall receive. I wrote a blog just for you:http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/?p=36875

Never underestimate the power of the words plz, please, and thank you.

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April 23, 2014 at 8:16 am

gauravhegde24 says:Hello Kevin,

I needed guidelines on how a particular object/class looks like in various band combinations for landsat images.for example crop looks bright red, fallow land looks yelow in fcc..

I need this for image classification. Hope I can get some reference for all major band combinations.Log in to Reply

April 23, 2014 at 9:18 am

kevin_butler says:I hate to break it to you, but its really not that simple. There are a ton of factors that go into how features look, and if you want to do aclassification, me telling you that vegetation is bright in the NIR is not going to get you where you want to be. My suggestion is load upthe imagery basemap from Arcgis Online and use that as a reference. Some stuff may have changed if there is a big difference in whenthe landsat imagery and the highres imagery was acquired, but most things are consistent. When you see a feature that youreinterested in, start playing with the band combinations and get a feel for how those features change as you change the bandcombinations. What are you classifying for?

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April 23, 2014 at 12:38 pm

gauravhegde24 says:Thanks for the suggestions Kevin.I am trying to classify a Landsat8 image to detect temporal changes in a mining area.I am trying to figure out how to be sure about signature pixels I choose..

Regards,Gaurav

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April 23, 2014 at 2:45 pm

kevin_butler says:You wont be sure about your training sites until you actually run the classification. It tends to be an iterative process that involvesa lot of tweaking to the training sites until you are satisfied with the output. Start with pixels that seem representative of thefeature you want to classify. If they are too pure youll miss classify some of the mixed pixels. If theyre too mixed youll missout on the pixels that only have that feature. It becomes as much of an art as science at this point.

If you use the MLClassify function (from the image analysis window, not the geoprocessing tool) it will display your results on thefly. I find that this saves time when Im going through and trying to perfect a classification.

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