A NEW INDEX FOR IDENTIFYING WATER BODY FROM SENTINEL-2 SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING IMAGERY

Abstract. Water body plays an irreplaceable role in the global ecosystem and climate system. Sentinel-2 is a new satellite data with higher spatial and spectral resolution. Through analysing spectral characteristics of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, the brightness of water body in vegetation red edge band and shortwave infrared band showe sharply different than that of the not water body. Therefore, a new type of water index SWI (Sentinel-2 Water Index) was proposed by combing those two bands. Four representative water types, which included Taihu Lake, the Yangtze River Estuary, the ChaKa Salt Lake and the Chain Lake, were selected as experimental areas. Normalized difference water index (NDWI) and Sentinel-2 Water Index (SWI) with Otsu method were employed to extract water body. The results showed that overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of SWI were higher than that of NDWI and SWI was efficient index to rapidly and accurately extract water for Sentinel-2 data. Therefore, SWI had application potential for larger scale water mapping in the future.