Ferric Oxides Index

Geological index for detecting ferric oxide concentrations in rocks and soils. Useful for identifying iron-rich minerals and oxide formations in geological mapping and mineral exploration. Geological indices identify mineral compositions and lithological features by targeting diagnostic absorption features in shortwave infrared wavelengths. Different minerals produce unique spectral signatures that these indices isolate. FOX is particularly suited for geology, mineral exploration, iron oxide detection. The general formula is NIR / Red, which requires Red and NIR spectral bands.

FOX is supported by 4 satellite sensors in our database, including Landsat 8/9, Sentinel-2, SuperView-2, WorldView 3. Each sensor uses different band designations — for example, Landsat 8/9 uses the formula B6 / B5, while Sentinel-2 uses B11 / B7. Select a sensor above to see its specific band mapping.

FOX requires Red (760-860 nm), NIR (1600-1700 nm). These specific wavelength regions correspond to diagnostic mineral absorption features caused by electronic transitions and vibrational overtones in crystal lattices.

Both Python and R code samples are provided above. In Python, use rasterio to load individual band GeoTIFF files and numpy for the arithmetic. In R, the terra package handles raster operations efficiently. The key is to load bands as floating-point arrays to avoid integer division, and to handle division-by-zero cases where the denominator equals zero. For production use, consider applying a valid data mask to exclude no-data pixels before calculation.

Geological index for detecting ferric oxide concentrations in rocks and soils. Useful for identifying iron-rich minerals and oxide formations in geological mapping and mineral exploration. For accurate mineral identification, this index should be used alongside other geological indices and validated with field samples or known geology maps. Spectral unmixing or supervised classification using multiple indices typically yields more reliable results than any single index alone.