Alteration zone mapping in the meiduk and sar cheshmeh porphyry copper mining districts of Iran using advanced land imager (ALI) satellite data

Abstract

This study evaluates the capability of Earth Observing-1 (EO1) Advanced Land Imager (ALI) data for hydrothermal alteration mapping in the Meiduk and Sar Cheshmeh porphyry copper mining districts, SE Iran. Feature-oriented principal components selection, 4/2, 8/9, 5/4 band ratioing were applied to ALI data for enhancing the hydrothermally altered rocks associated with porphyry copper mineralization, lithological units and vegetation. Mixture-tuned matched-filtering (MTMF) was tested to discriminate the hydrothermal alteration areas of porphyry copper mineralization from surrounding environment using the shortwave infrared bands of ALI. Results indicate that the tested methods are able to yield spectral information for identifying vegetation, iron oxide/hydroxide and clay minerals, lithological units and the discrimination of hydrothermally altered rocks from unaltered rocks using ALI data.