Feasibility of Using SWIR-Transformed Reflectance (STR) in Place of Surface Temperature (Ts) for the Mapping of Irrigated Landcover

(1) Background: A simple approach to map irrigated landcover has been introduced by using measures derived from the optical spectral range as an alternative to the thermal range. It has been demonstrated that substituting surface temperature (Ts, ‘thermal approach’) with SWIR-transformed reflectance (STR, ‘optical approach’) to detect surface moisture is feasible with comparable results. (2) Methods: Using an iterative thresholding procedure to minimize within-class variance, the bilevel segmentation of variables derived from Landsat-8 representing surface moisture and vegetation cover was achieved for the 2020–2021 summer for a key irrigation district in Australia. (3) Results: The results of irrigated landcover by the optical approach were found to be comparable with those obtained by the thermal approach. The classification accuracy was assessed using water delivery records at the farm level. Although the overall accuracy was high in both cases, the optical approach (97.6%) performed slightly better than the thermal approach (93.9%). (4) Conclusions: The feasibility of using STR to map irrigated landcover has been confirmed by a high-level overall accuracy assessment. This has broader implications in terms of irrigated landcover assessment, as the use of satellite imagery in these applications may not necessarily be limited to microwave or thermal sensors.