Water classification of the Colorado River Corridor, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 2013Data

These data area classified maps of water in the Colorado River at a discharge of approximately 227 meters squared/second in Grand Canyon from Glen Canyon Dam to Pearce Ferry in Arizona. The data are derived from interpretation of multispectral high resolution airborne imagery that was acquired in May 2013. The water classification data have the same 0.2-meter ground resolution as the imagery. These data have not undergone a statistical accuracy assessment, but they are based on methods that included image interpretation to exhaustively identify water which have been shown to produce very high classification accuracies and excellent correlation between maps of total vegetation produced by independent analysts and ground truth. When developing these data from the native raster format we also considered the differences in water origin, and differentiated between water in the Colorado River mainstem as opposed to within tributary channels. Backwaters with fluid connection to the mainstem river channel were categorized as mainstem water. Backwaters completely disconnected from the mainstem were grouped with the tributary water. We created a water classification dataset from multispectral high resolution imagery. All processing steps were completed in ENVI + IDL 5.3 a product of Harris Geospatial Solutions (copyright 2017 Exelis Visual Information Solutions, Inc., a subsidiary of Harris Corporation) and ArcGIS 10.3 a product of ESRI (copyright 2017).