Have you tried the Spectral Indices tool in ENVI 5.3? This provides a large range of spectral indices that work with wide band sensors like TM.

Hi Joao, Yes, something is definitely not right if that is all you are seeing. I just loaded a Landsat 5 TM file into ENVI and I was able to choose from 32 different spectral indices in the Spectral Indices tool. This tool queries the input file to look for the available bands and associated wavelengths. I'm wondering if it's possible that this information may have been stripped from your file at some point during pre-processing? When you right-click on your image in the Layer Manager and select View Metadata, do you see wavelength information associated with each of the 6 available bands in the image file? If not, this might be the problem. You can add this information to the file if it is missing using the Edit ENVI Header tool available in the ENVI Toolbox. What's puzzling to me is that NDVI and SR require at least 4 bands (R, G , B, NIR) and if those can be calculated, there are at least 10 others that should be available as well. If you're still stuck I'd be curious what version of ENVI you are working with and if you have tried this with any other Landsat images. Thanks, Joe

You may have to create them yourself using bandmath. I have created NDVI, SATVI, SWIR32, RGR and NDII all from landsat 5 using bandmath.

Dear all, thank you! I'm running ENVI 5.2 and in the end I had to calculate the VIs (NDVI, EVI, SAVI and MSAVI) using Band Math. I'm using the surface reflectance Landsat 5 TM datasets avalable at USGS Earth Explorer. You're saying this was a bug and it's solved in ENVI 5.3? Thanks Joao

Actually, there is a new tool in ENVI 5.3 called 'Spectral Indices' that include the older Vegetation Indices plus many new ones. This tool is more robust than the previous tool.