The effect of spatial resolution upon texture-based cloud field classifications

The loss of cloud-classification accuracy as a function of spatial resolution is assessed by investigating the variation of textural measures as a function of spatial resolution. Landsat MSS imagery is progressively averaged to produce degraded imagery of 1/8-km, 1/4-km, 1/2-km, and 1-km spatial resolution, and textural measures are computed from the Gray Level Difference Vector (GLDV) approach described by Chen et al. (1989). It is found that the classification accuracies obtained using the 1/8-km spatial resolution data are similar to those obtained using the full-resolution (1/16 km) texture measures, indicating that there is no advantage in using even higher spatial resolution 30-m Landsat Thematic Mapper and 10-m SPOT imagery for cloud classification.