Annual dynamics of impervious surface in the Pearl River Delta, China, from 1988 to 2013, using time series Landsat imagery

• Temporal spectral signature of each pixel built using densified Landsat time series.
• Temporal characteristics of land covers identified by three biophysical variables.
• Impervious and pervious surfaces differentiated by time series similarity measures.
• A decision tree classifier was applied to estimate annual impervious surfaces.

Information on impervious surface distribution and dynamics is useful for understanding urbanization and its impacts on hydrological cycle, water management, surface energy balances, urban heat island, and biodiversity. Numerous methods have been developed and successfully applied to estimate impervious surfaces. Previous methods of impervious surface estimation mainly focused on the spectral differences between impervious surfaces and other land covers. Moreover, the accuracy of estimation from single or multi-temporal images was often limited by the mixed pixel problem in coarse- or medium-resolution imagery or by the intra-class spectral variability problem in high resolution imagery. Time series satellite imagery provides potential to resolve the above problems as well as the spectral confusion with similar surface characteristics due to phenological change, inter-annual climatic variability, and long-term changes of vegetation. Since Landsat time series has a long record with an effective spatial resolution, this study aimed at estimating and mapping impervious surfaces by analyzing temporal spectral differences between impervious and pervious surfaces that were extracted from dense time series Landsat imagery. Specifically, this study developed an efficient method to extract annual impervious surfaces from time series Landsat data and applied it to the Pearl River Delta, southern China, from 1988 to 2013. The annual classification accuracy yielded from 71% to 91% for all classes, while the mapping accuracy of impervious surfaces ranged from 80.5% to 94.5%. Furthermore, it is found that the use of more than 50% of Scan Line Corrector (SLC)-off images after 2003 did not substantially reduced annual classification accuracy, which ranged from 78% to 91%. It is also worthy to note that more than 80% of classification accuracies were achieved in both 2002 and 2010 despite of more than 40% of cloud cover detected in these two years. These results suggested that the proposed method was effective and efficient in mapping impervious surfaces and detecting impervious surface changes by using temporal spectral differences from dense time series Landsat imagery. The value of full sampling was revealed for enhancing temporal resolution and identifying temporal differences between impervious and pervious surfaces in time series analysis.