Investigating Alteration Zone Mapping Using EO-1 Hyperion Imagery and Airborne Geophysics Data

Abstract

Hyperspectral remote sensing records reflectance or emittance data in a large sum of contiguous and narrow spectral bands, and thus has many information in detecting and mapping the mineral zones. On the other hand, the geological and geophysical data gives us some other fruitful information about the physical characteristics of soil and minerals that have been recorded from the surface. The Sarcheshmeh mining area located in the NW-trending Uromieh-Dokhtar magmatic belt within Central Iran is mainly of porphyry type, and is associated with extensive hydrothermal alterations. Due to the semi-arid type of climate with abundant rock exposure, this area is suitable for application of remote sensing techniques. In this work, we focus on generating the alteration maps around Cu porphyry copper deposits using the spectral angle mapper algorithm on Hyperion data by applying two filters named reduction to pole and analytical signal on a total magnetic intensity map and generating the Kd map from radiometry data. What is clear is the high importance of applying the adequate pre-processing on Hyperion data because of low signal-to-noise ratio. By comparing the known deposits in the region with the results obtained by applying the mentioned methods, it is revealed that not all the higher K radiometric values are entirely associated with the hydrothermal alteration zones, and in contrast, the potassic alteration map extracted from Hyperion imagery successfully corresponds to the alteration zones around the Sarcheshmeh mining area. Finally, the results particularly obtained from processing the Hyperion data are confirmed by indices of Cu porphyry deposits in the region.