Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI)

The Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) is a new method that has been developed to delineate open water features and enhance their presence in remotelysensed digital imagery. The NDWI makes use of reflected nearinfrared radiation and visible green light to enhance the presence of such features while eliminating the presence of soil and terrestrial vegetation features. It is suggested that the NDWI may also provide researchers with turbidity estimations of water bodies using remotelysensed digital data.

Values description: Values of water bodies are larger than 0.5. Vegetation has much smaller values, which results in distinguishing vegetation from water bodies easier. Builtup features have positive values between zero and 0.2.