Persistent waterholes derived from Landsat archive for NAWRA

Persistent waterholes provide important refuge habitats. Waterhole persistence data shows the percentage of years where surface water has been identified along the stream channels during the driest period of the dry seasons from 1988 to 2015 and is derived from Landsat imagery. This dataset was created for the CSIRO Northern Australia Water Resource Assessment (NAWRA) project.
These data are maps of persistent waterholes derived from the Landsat archive from 1988 to 2015 (i.e. 27 years). The Landsat archive data were extracted from Geoscience Australia’s Surface Reflectance NBAR product available on the National Computing Infrastructure. The method used to derive the persistent waterhole maps is described in the NAWRA technical report (Sims et al., 2016). The data are provided as percentage of (valid) years that a pixel contained water at the end of the dry season. A percent value of 100 means that the pixel was wet at the end of every dry season for all available years. Those pixels containing water in them at the end of the dry season for at least 90% of the years are provided as shape files. More information is provided in the supporting attachment.