schooner-cloud - create a cloud mask from a landsat 8 QA band
schooner-cloud quality-assessment-band.tif out.tif
The schooner-blend tool creates a cloud and snow mask from a landsat 8 quality assessment band. These bands are distributed within Landsat 8 tarballs and are named like:
landsat-id_BQA.TIF
This kind of mask is useful when averaging multiple datasets together with schooner-blend. Once you've run this command to create a mask you need to use something like:
gdal_calc.py -A mask.tif -B landsat.tif --calc="A*B" --allBands=B --overwrite --type=Byte
to apply it to your final image.
This tool only works with Landsat 8 quality bands and removes that band's classified snow and cloud flags. It uses the masks defined in the Landsat 8 documentation at:
http://landsat.usgs.gov/L8QualityAssessmentBand.php
schooner-cloud treats all "maybe" bits as definitely classified as cloudy.
As of this writing the Landsat program is reprocessing old images to include a cloud flag using the cfmask algorithm, and this tool is expected to work when the QA bands are updated.
If you want to try to create a better quality assessment band for Landsat 8 images you might want to try the fmask algorithm here:
https://code.google.com/p/cfmask/
schooner-contrast(1), schooner-blend(1), schooner-multibalance(1), schooner-stitch(1)