IRRegionen

IRRegionen is a term used in geospatial analysis and remote sensing to denote a division of geographic space into units defined by similarity in infrared radiation characteristics. The concept focuses on wavelengths in the infrared spectrum, including near-infrared related to vegetation vigor and thermal infrared related to surface temperature. IRRegionen are not fixed political units; they are data-driven regions that can change over time to reflect seasonal and climatic variation.

They are typically derived from satellite imagery acquired by sensors such as Landsat, MODIS, or Sentinel-3, after preprocessing steps like atmospheric correction and cloud masking. Analysts extract infrared-related features, including surface reflectance in the near-IR and thermal-emissivity-based temperature estimates, and often compute indices such as NDVI or land surface temperature anomaly. Unsupervised (or semi-supervised) clustering methods, such as k-means or ISODATA, or supervised classification with labeled samples, are used to assign pixels to IRRegionen that share similar infrared signatures. The resulting map consists of contiguous regions with coherent infrared characteristics.

Applications include environmental monitoring, agricultural management, urban heat island assessment, forestry and drought analysis, and climate studies. IRRegionen enable cross-regional comparisons of heat and moisture patterns and support planning decisions that rely on thermal or vegetation stress signals.

Limitations include sensitivity to atmospheric conditions, sensor resolution, seasonal variability, and the need for cross-sensor calibration to maintain consistency across time. See also remote sensing, land surface temperature, and infrared spectroscopy.