The Use of LANDSAT Multispectral Data to Derive Land Cover Information for the Location and Quantification of Non-Point Source Water Pollutants

The Regional Planning Council (RPC) provides a clearinghouse and advisory service to the city and five surrounding counties of the Baltimore region (Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford, and Howard counties and Baltimore City.) The RPC staff is divided into various technical divisions providing support in the numerous aspects of modern planning. A great portion of this work is indirect response to the requirements of various Federal programs and legislation. In early 1976, the RPC received a Water Quality Planning Grant under the Federal Clean Water Act Amendments of 1972 (PL-92-500, Section 208). The work program for this grant required a detailed, up-to-date knowledge of the land cover for use in water pollution models. In addition, the Section 208 Planning Grant was to be used to raise the level of local government expertise wherever practical in data collection procedures, use of different data sources, modeling, computer classification procedures, etc. Various methods of data processing, remote job entry (RJE) and computer interactive systems (Larsys, Elltab, Orser, GE Image-100, Bendix, etc.), available for processing LANDSAT and other sensor data, were evaluated to determine how well they could meet the Section 208 Project\u27s needs and goals