Mapping of ferric (Fe3+) and ferrous (Fe2+) iron oxides distribution using ASTER and Landsat 8 OLI data, in Negash Lateritic iron deposit, Northern Ethiopia

Iron plays an important role in industrial and engineering fields development of a country and as such there is an enormous demand for iron in Ethiopia. However, a search for this valuable primary mineral resource exploration remains challenging and costly. Therefore, this study aims to map iron oxide minerals using Landsat-8/operational land imager (OLI) and advanced space-borne thermal emission and reflection (ASTER) satellite imagery in Negash Lateritic iron deposit, Northern Ethiopia to ease the costs and reduce the time. Different image processing techniques such as band ratio, selective principal component analysis, linear spectral unmixing, and mixture-tuned matched filter were used to produce iron oxide maps. Minimum noise fraction (MNF), pixel purity index (PPI), and N-dimensional visualizer were also applied to extract endmembers in the automated spectral hourglass wizard. In addition to this, the enhanced image thresholding and scatter plot were used to map the potential areas. Ferric iron oxide band ratio of ASTER mapped maximum area of 62.1 km2 followed by a laterite band ratio of ASTER covering 57.8 km2. The result was validated using existing iron oxide polygons and the outcome obtained from selective PCA shows a strong match with the existing iron oxide polygons. The sub-pixel mapping techniques show poor accuracy in mapping goethite and hematite relative to the pixel level. Thus, it is evident from the results that ASTER mapped better than Landsat 8 OLI for band ratios of selective PCA, unmixing, MTMF, and mineralized areas while characterizing with limited fieldwork.