Behavior of Landsat Thematic Mapper Wavebands on Lut Desert (Iran)

To study the capabilities of remotely sensed data in discriminating land cover types and geomorphologic features of desert, the southeast of Lut Desert was selected. In this study, seven bands of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM), data and other sources of information such as topographic maps (1:50,000), aerial photos (1:20,000) and field data were used. The visual image interpretation was performed based on photomorphic unit analysis and interpretation keys. To classify the images, 10 training classes were used for maximum likelihood classification algorithm. Then the classified images were assessed with the test areas and the overall accuracy was about 92 percent. Based on the obtained results it may be concluded that Landsat TM thermal and reflective bands could be useful for studying Lut Desert conditions especially in the Yardang and sand dune regions. From the results obtained we may also conclude that such a hyper arid climatic and bare land are suitable conditions for a better understanding of the behavior of TM wavebands on different sur-faces and soil conditions.