hawaiian elevation and weathers affect on vegetation

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