By: Andrew Vogel
• In this project I will be looking at Satellite images of Hawaii and showing how Elevation and Precipitation will effect the landscapes of the Hawaiian Big Island.
• When everyone thinks of Hawaii they think of the Rain Forest Jungles, and volcanoes, but are those the only landscapes there?
• I took Landsat 4/5 tm
data for Hawaii on July
24 1992
• It was UTM zone 5 North
and was basically mostly
the Big Island and Maui.
• Knowing its Hawaii there
are a lot of clouds
present at almost anytime
so this was about the
best image I could get.
• First I took the data and layer stacked all 9 files.
• After layerstacking the images I took the layer stacked
image and created an NDVI, IR/R and VegInd to see
where most of the vegetation was on these Islands
• Once looking at the vegetation indexes I took the
layerstacked image again and created a unsupervised
classification of the map to locate where the most dense
vegetation are and where the driest areas are.
• People think that Hawaii is just Islands in the
middle of the Pacific made out of Volcanoes, and
Tropical Rain Forest.
• But the thing is, is that there are landscapes
there that you wouldn’t think of.
• In this Project, I am going to examine he
vegetation on the Big Island of Hawaii and also
Maui as well and look at why the vegetation is
the way it is.
Tropical Rain forest
are main thing
people think of
when talking about
Hawaiian
vegetation.
• The ocean is
another main thing
people think about
when talking about
Hawaiian landscape
• The Landscape that many
people wouldn’t expect to
be on Hawaii are deserts
• In this project am going to
show you why these
deserts are here
• Hawaii rest at
around 20
degrees north
and 157 degrees
W.
• As you can see
in the both of
these pictures
the weather first
hits the east
coast of the
islands
• Elevation plays another
important role
• From ArcGIS 10.1 I
created this picture to
show the elevations and
where the highest points
are on these two islands.
• As the weather pushes
over these higher
elevation it releases rain
and once going down in
elevation it evaporates
leaving not much rain on
the western sides of the
Island
• Orthographic
uplifting is on of the
causes why there is
such dense
vegetation on the
eastern part of these
mountains.
• Rising air gets
pushed up into the
atmosphere and
creates clouds and
precipitates
• The Rain
Shadow is the
area beyond the
high elevation
that don’t get
much rain due to
the Orthographic
Uplift from the
mountains
• As you can see
the eastern side
of these Islands
almost get
double the
amount of rain.
NDVIVegetation Index
IR/R
• Red band on 4
• Green band on
3
• Blue band on 2
• In conclusion weather and Elevation have a great affect
on the vegetation on Hawaii.
• As you can see on all of the maps the most dense
vegetation for these islands is on the eastern parts of the
Island.
• The driest places on the islands are basically right behind
the highest elevation where rain evaporates as it
descends down the mountains.
• http://www.photosjunction.com/contents/member/nature/p
hotos/big-island-hawaii-photo-38cba.jpg
• http://rainfall.geography.hawaii.edu/rainfall.html