Python for Geosciences: Spectral Analysis (Step by Step)

Third post in a series that will teach non-programmers how to use Python to handle and analyze geospatial data

Due to changes in Medium.com policy concerning non-members reads, implemented in Sep 2023, this post is now freely available on geocorner.net: https://www.geocorner.net/post/python-for-geosciences-spectral-analysis-step-by-step

Introduction

Hello and welcome back. This is the third story of the series Python for Geosciences, which has the objective to help non-programmers to start using Python for spatial data analysis and to automate it’s geospatial related processes. In the first post of the series (here), we learned how to prepare the Python environment on Windows using the Anaconda package manager and how to open a GeoTiff image from a Jupyter notebook. Next, on the second post (here), we saw the basics of matrix manipulation and we also learned how to created a flexible function to calculate Normalized Difference Indexes (such as NDVI, MNDWI, etc.), given two bands.

For this third post, we will continue to analyse the image’s data, and our goal is to plot some spectral data for different targets. In remote sensing, target is usually referred to what type of coverage is present…