Landsat Compositing of the Ucayali Region in Peru

The USGS User Services, in collaboration with a NASA project, created this compositing workflow that produces Landsat composites for the Ucayali region in Peru. The Ucayali region is located in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon and spans approximately 102,400 square kilometers (39,537 square miles), making it the largest region in the country. The Ucayali experiences significant cloud cover throughout the year, has variable vegetation, shadow effects from tall trees and varied topography, which render it an especially challenging area to create clear composites. We address these complications using a Maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (MAX-NDVI) compositing technique, which is ideal for selecting the greenest pixels and minimizing cloud and shadow contamination.