Hydrothermal alteration mapping using aster data in East Kunlun Mountains, China

ASTER has higher spatial resolution in the VNIR region and higher spectral resolution in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) region in comparison with ETM+, which provide us an opportunity to distinguish various clay-alteration minerals accurately. In this paper, the 14 bands of ASTER were adopted to identify the lithologic and hydrothermal alteration minerals, such as the calcite, kaolinite and OH bearing minerals and so on, in the East Kunlun region of China. The effect of different mapping methods presented in the past, including band ratio, relative band-depth (RBD) images, False Color Composite (FCC) and SFF et al, were compared and analyzed. Results indicate that the mineral index method is suit to the high and cold mountainous area and could get the ideal result relative to the others. This work study once more again shows that the multi-spectral remote sensing techniques have excellent potentials for metallic mineral prognostication.