The satellite images published on Satmapper.hu about Kiszombor are ideally updated with a frequency of a few days, which means that a lot of images are available each year. You might ask what the benefits of this dataset? The answer is simple! Let’s see what happens if we put the images taken in 2019 in chronological order!
You may have guessed from the introduction, that this post will show cover nothing more than an animation made from satellite images from 2019, which can be used to show how a particular area has changed over a given period of time. To do this we will need all the cloudless recordings of the examined year, as well as a program that combines them into animation. But let’s see how Kiszombor (HU) changed in 2019!
The animation below is made from RGB satellite images and shows perfectly how the landscape turns green quite slowly from the beginning of the year and then – with the arrival of the harvesting time and autumn – the barren areas get dominant again. The high resolution animation can be downloaded from the link below.
The following animation was made from the NDWI images. NDWI can be used to see how open water surfaces (lakes, rivers) have changed and whether there have been inland areas during the year or not. Based on the recordings, the latter was not really typical, as no trace of inland water can be seen in any of the frames, however, the islands emerging in the River Maros can be well observed. You can learn more about the NDWI on the homepage. The high resolution animation can be downloaded from the link below.
The third animation shows the annual change of the NDVI. With the help of this index, it is possible to distinguish between areas that are covered with plants, as well as parts within the agricultural area where the conditions for plant development are less favorable. As a reminder, dark green areas indicate healthy vegetation, while yellow areas indicate its absence.You can find information on the homapage about how to interpret the colorbar shown on the animation below. The high resolution animation can be downloaded from the link under it.
The last animation shows the annual change of the NDMI. You can see that at the beginning of the year the agricultural areas were relatively dry (orange areas), then the areas became more and more wet (blue areas) due to the spring rains. The high resolution animation can be downloaded from the link below.
I hope that you enjoyed this post and I managed to point out what a great tool satellite remote sensing can be to track changes in our environment!