Landsat 8 Bands Combination

Summary

Landsat 8 is the most recent satellite in the Landsat program. The data quality (signal-to-noise
ratio) and radiometric quantization (12-bits) of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and
Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) are higher than previous Landsat instruments (8-bit for TM and
ETM+). Since it's launch on February 11, 2013, Landsat 8 has been providing some truly
stunning images of the earth's surface. Beyond their beauty, these images are packed with
information which can be manipulated to extract features and discern changes to the earth's
surface over time.
When working with Landsat imagery, a logical first step is to load an image into an image
analysis program and begin to visualize what is in the scene. The OLI sensor aboard Landsat 8
has nine bands for capturing the spectral response of the earth's surface at discrete wavelengths
along the electromagnetic spectrum. Additionally, the TIRS sensor aboard Landsat 8 collects
information at two discrete wavelengths within the thermal infrared portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum. These wavelengths have been chosen carefully based on years of
scientific research.
Heres how the new bands from Landsat 8 line up with Landsat 7:
Landsat 7
Band
Name

Landsat 8
Bandwidt
h (m)

Resolut
ion (m)

Band
Name

Bandwid
th (m)

Resolut
ion (m)

Band 1
Coastal

0.43
0.45

30

Band 1
Blue

0.45
0.52

30

Band 2
Blue

0.45
0.51

30

Band 2
Green

0.52
0.60

30

Band 3
Green

0.53
0.59

30

Band 3
Red

0.63
0.69

30

Band 4
Red

0.64
0.67

30

Band 4
NIR

0.77
0.90

30

Band 5
NIR

0.85
0.88

30

Band 5
SWIR 1

1.55
1.75

30

Band 6
SWIR 1

1.57
1.65

30

Band 7
SWIR 2

2.09
2.35

30

Band 7
SWIR 2

2.11
2.29

30

Band 8
Pan

Band 6
TIR

0.52
0.90

10.40
12.50

15

30/60

Band 8
Pan

0.50
0.68

15

Band 9
Cirrus

1.36
1.38

30

Band 10
TIRS 1

10.6
11.19

100

Band 11
TIRS 2

11.5
12.51

100

Landsat 8 measures different ranges of frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum a color,
although not necessarily a color visible to the human eye. Each range is called a band, and
Landsat 8 has 11 bands. Landsat numbers its red, green, and blue sensors as 4, 3, and 2, so when
we combine them we get a true-color image such as this one:

Landsat 8 view of the Los Angeles area, May 13th, 2013. The image is rotated so north is up. All
image data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Have a look at the full list of Landsat 8s bands:
Band Number
m
Resolution
1

0.4330.453

30 m

0.4500.515

30 m

0.5250.600

30 m

0.6300.680

30 m

0.8450.885

30 m

1.5601.660

30 m

2.1002.300

30 m

0.5000.680

15 m

1.3601.390

30 m

10

10.6-11.2

100 m

11
11.5-12.5
100 m
Of its 11 bands, only those in the very shortest wavelengths (bands 14 and 8) sense visible light
all the others are in parts of the spectrum that we cant see. The true-color view from Landsat is
less than half of what it sees. To understand the value of all the bands, lets look at them each in
turn:
The Bands
Band 1 senses deep blues and violets. Blue light is hard to collect from space because its
scattered easily by tiny bits of dust and water in the air, and even by air molecules themselves.
This is one reason why very distant things (like mountains on the horizon) appear blueish, and
why the sky is blue. Just as we see a lot of hazy blue when we look up at space on a sunny day,
Landsat 8 sees the sky below it when it looks down at us through the same air. That part of the
spectrum is hard to collect with enough sensitivity to be useful, and Band 1 is the only
instrument of its kind producing open data at this resolution one of many things that make this
satellite special. Its also called the coastal/aerosol band, after its two main uses: imaging shallow
water, and tracking fine particles like dust and smoke. By itself, its output looks a lot like Band 2
(normal blue)s, but if we contrast them and highlight areas with more deep blue, we can see
differences:

Band 1 minus Band 2. The ocean and living plants reflect more deep blue-violet hues. Most
plants produce surface wax (for example, the frosty coating on fresh plums) as they grow, to
reflect harmful ultraviolet light away.
Bands 2, 3, and 4 are visible blue, green, and red. But while were revisiting them, lets take a
reference section of Los Angeles, with a range of different land uses, to compare against other
bands:

Part of the western LA area, from agricultural land near Oxnard in the west to Hollywood and
downtown in the east. Like most urban areas, the colors of the city average out to light gray at
this scale.
Band 5 measures the near infrared, or NIR. This part of the spectrum is especially important for
ecology because healthy plants reflect it the water in their leaves scatters the wavelengths back

into the sky. By comparing it with other bands, we get indexes like NDVI, which let us measure
plant health more precisely than if we only looked at visible greenness.

The bright features are parks and other heavily irrigrated vegetation. The point near the bottom
of this view on the west is Malibu, so its a safe bet that the little bright spot in the hills near it is
a golf course. On the west edge is the dark scar of a large fire, which was only a slight
discoloration in the true-color image.
Bands 6 and 7 cover different slices of the shortwave infrared, or SWIR. They are particularly
useful for telling wet earth from dry earth, and for geology: rocks and soils that look similar in
other bands often have strong contrasts in SWIR. Lets make a false-color image by using SWIR
as red, NIR as green, and deep blue as blue (technically, a 7-5-1 image):

The fire scar is now impossible to miss reflecting strongly in Band 7 and hardly at all in the
others, making it red. Previously subtle details of vegetation also become clear. It seems that
plants in the canyons north of Malibu are more lush than those on the ridges, which is typical of
climates where water is the main constraint on growth. We also see vegetation patterns within
LA some neighborhoods have more foliage (parks, sidewalk trees, lawns) than others.

Band 8 is the panchromatic or just pan band. It works just like black and white film: instead
of collecting visibile colors separately, it combines them into one channel. Because this sensor
can see more light at once, its the sharpest of all the bands, with a resolution of 15 meters (50
feet). Lets zoom in on Malibu at 1:1 scale in the pan band:

And in true color, stretched to cover the same area:

The color version looks out of focus because those sensors cant see details of this size. But if we
combine the color information that they provide with the detail from the pan band a process
called pan sharpening we get something thats both colorful and crisp:

Pansharpened Malibu, 15 m (50 ft) per pixel. Notice the wave texture in the water.
Band 9 shows the least, yet its one of the most interesting features of Landsat 8. It covers a very
thin slice of wavelengths: only 1370 10 nanometers. Few space-based instruments collect this
part of the spectrum, because the atmosphere absorbs almost all of it. Landsat 8 turns this into an
advantage. Precisely because the ground is barely visible in this band, anything that appears
clearly in it must be reflecting very brightly and/or be above most of the atmosphere. Heres
Band 9 for this scene:

Band 9 is just for clouds! Here its picking up fluffy cumulus clouds, but its designed especially
for cirrus clouds high, wispy horsetails. Cirrus are a real headache for satellite imaging
because their soft edges make them hard to spot, and an image taken through them can contain
measurements that are off by a few percent without any obvious explanation. Band 9 makes them
easy to account for.
Bands 10 and 11 are in the thermal infrared, or TIR they see heat. Instead of measuring the
temperature of the air, like weather stations do, they report on the ground itself, which is often
much hotter.
Important TIRS calibration notice from USGS, Jan. 6, 2014: Due to the larger calibration
uncertainty associated with TIRS band 11, it is recommended that users refrain from relying on
band 11 data in quantitative analysis of the TIRS data, such as the use of split window techniques
for atmospheric correction and retrieval of surface temperature values.
We suggest that Band 10 be used in conjunction with an atmospheric model to estimate surface
brightness temperature. Our calibration team has found that with current processing these surface
brightness temperatures are accurate to within ~1 K for many 15 35 C targets, e.g., growing
season vegetated targets.
For more details, please visit the Landsat 8 Data Users Handbook
A study a few years ago found some desert surface temperatures higher than 70 C (159 F)
hot enough to fry an egg. Luckily, LA is relatively temperate in this scene:

Notice that the very dark (cold) spots match the clouds in Band 9. After them, irrigated
vegetation is coolest, followed by open water and natural vegetation. The burn scar near Malibu,
which is covered in charcoal and dry, dead foliage, has a very high surface temperature. Within
the city, parks are generally coolest and industrial neighborhoods are warmest. There is no clear
urban heat island in this scene an effect that these TIR bands will be particularly useful for
studying.
Bands can be combined in many different ways to reveal different features in the landscape.
Lets make another false-color image by using this TIR band for red, a SWIR band for green,
and the natural green band for blue (a 10-7-3 image):

Urban areas and some kinds of soil are pink. In the true-color image, wild vegetation is almost
uniformly olive-colored, but here we see a distinction between peach-colored scrubland,
mahogany-colored woodland, and so on. Cooling onshore breezes appear as a slight purple
gradient along the coast of the city. The colored strips on either side of the image are areas where
not all sensors have coverage.

Standard digital cameras are designed to replicate what we see with the human eye, so they
capture light only in the red, green and blue wavelengths and then apply red, green and blue
filters (also known as channels) to these wavelengths, respectively, that when combined generate
a natural looking RGB image. With a multispectral image from a sensor system such as Landsat
8, we have a lot more information to work with. Different wavelengths can often help us discern
some features better than others or even help us "see through" features such as clouds or smoke.
For example, the Near Infrared (NIR) wavelength is one of the most commonly used
wavelengths on multispectral sensors because vegetation reflects so strongly in this portion of
the electromagnetic spectrum that this information proves very useful when performing
vegetation analyses. The Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) bands aboard Landsat 8 are very useful for
discerning differences in bare earth and for telling what is wet and what is dry in a scene. There
are many other examples of the advantages of the available bands in Landsat images, but what I
would like to do here is simply show how loading different combinations of these bands into the
red, green and blue channels makes different features stand out. I am not the first to do this, but I
just thought I would add an additional resource to the world wide web for showing how these
band combinations can be used to visualize Landsat 8 images.
Natural Color

432

False Color (urban)

764

Color Infrared (vegetation)

543

Agriculture

652

Atmospheric Penetration

765

Healthy Vegetation

562

Land/Water

564

Natural With Atmospheric Removal

753

Shortwave Infrared

754

Vegetation Analysis

654

4 , 3 , 2 - Natural Color Image, Fresno, California

This band combination is as close to "true color" as you can get with a Landsat OLI image. One
unfortunate drawback with this band combination is that these bands tend to be susceptible to
atmospheric interference, so they sometimes appear hazy.

5, 4, 3 - Traditional Color Infrared (CIR) Image, Colorado/Utah

Note how vegetation really pops in red, with healthier vegetation being more vibrant. It's also
easier to tell different types of vegetation apart than it is with a natural color image. This is a
very commonly used band combination in remote sensing when looking at vegetation, crops and
wetlands.

7, 6, 4 - False Color useful for visualizing urban environments, Los Angeles, California
Because this band combination makes use of both of the SWIR bands aboard Landsat 8, the
image is much more crisp than band combinations that make use of bands in shorter wavelengths,
which are more susceptible to haze.

5, 6, 4 - False Color good for picking out land from water, Hudson Bay, Canada
In this false color image, land appears in shades of orange and green, ice stands out as a vibrant
magenta color, and water appears in shades of blue.

7, 5, 3 - False color image with good atmospheric penetration, Washington/Oregon

This band combination is similar to the 5, 6, 4 band combination shown above, but vegetation
shows up in more vibrant shades of green. This band combination was used for the global
Landsat mosaic created by NASA.

6, 5, 2 - False color for agriculture, Fruita, Colorado

This band combination is useful for the monitoring of agricultural crops, which appear as a
vibrant green. Bare earth appears as a magenta color and non-crop vegetation appears as more
subdued shades of green.

7, 5, 2 - False color often used for visualizing forest fire burn scars, Rim Fire, California
This band combination is similar to the 6, 5, 2 band combination shown above, but by pushing
further into the SWIR range of the electromagnetic spectrum, there is less susceptibility to smoke
and haze generated by a burning fire.

6, 3, 2 - False color for distinguishing differences in bare earth, Canyonlands NP, Utah
This band combination is good for discerning variations in a landscape that does not contain an
abundance of vegetation. It is good for geologic applications.

5, 7, 1 - False color for vegetation and water, Lake Victoria, Tanzania

This band combination makes use of the NIR, SWIR2, and Coastal Aerosol bands, respectively.
The Coastal Aerosol band is unique to Landsat 8 and is used primarily to track fine particles like
dust and smoke, and also to peer into shallow water. With this color combination, vegetation
appears orange.

There are certainly several additional band combinations that would be useful for visualizing
Landsat 8 scenes. In some situations, loading a grayscale image of a single band might also help
to visualize specific features or phenomena. For example, in the grayscale image below, we are
viewing the Thermal Infrared 1 band from the Landsat 8 TIRS sensor. This image, captured over
Iceland, shows the Bardarbunga volcano in bright white in the top center of the image. Since we
are using a thermal infrared band, this feature sticks out significantly from the ice sheet located
just to the south of the lava flow.

With grayscale images, we also have the option of applying a color table to highlight features a
little more clearly. In the image below we are viewing the same grayscale image of the
Bardarbunga volcano, but now we have applied a color table that shows very cold extremes of
the glacier in shades of deeper blue and very warm extremes of the lava flow in shades of deeper
red.

There are many analysis techniques that can be applied to multispectral imagery to extract
specific features of interest. These algorithms rely on the same principles of reflectivity and
absorption at various wavelengths that allow us to see certain features when visualizing them
with different band combinations. An important point to note is that if a particular band, or
combination of bands, does a good job of helping you visualize a feature that is of interest to you,
then it is highly likely that this band, or combination of bands, can be used to help you isolate
that feature from your image. For more on this topic, please check out the section of
our Documentation Center devoted to Spectral Indices.