Landsat Science

Landsat Science

Landsat Science

Landsat Science

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

50 Years of

Landsat Science

“If you really want a long history of understanding any process on Earth, Landsat is where you should go.”

-Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas Initiative

Landsat Next Defined

Landsat Next Defined

June 29, 2023

Landsat Next is on the horizon—the new mission will not only ensure continuity of the longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface, it will fundamentally transform the breadth and depth of actionable information freely available to end users. Take a look at the new capabilities that will define the next Landsat mission.

A black cow stands in a green pasture eating grass.

Meat of the Matter:
Colorado River Over-Consumed

April 30, 2024

More water is taken from the Colorado River than it has to give. Better water use accounting made possible by Landsat provides needed guidance for difficult water use decisions.

A thumbnail for a video titled Data in Harmony, NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 Project

Data in Harmony: NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 Project

April 22, 2024

NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project is a groundbreaking initiative that combines data from Landsats 8 & 9 with the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A & 2B satellites.

Expanding OpenET Across Amazon Basin

April 16, 2024

The research teams who help sustain the largest freshwater reserve in the world are developing a new tool to promote more resilient farming systems in Brazil. The goal is to help farmers better handle changes in the water cycle, deal with droughts, and adapt to a changing climate.

Landsat Next Defined

Landsat Next Defined

June 29, 2023

Landsat Next is on the horizon—the new mission will not only ensure continuity of the longest space-based record of Earth’s land surface, it will fundamentally transform the breadth and depth of actionable information freely available to end users. Take a look at the new capabilities that will define the next Landsat mission.

A black cow stands in a green pasture eating grass.

Meat of the Matter:
Colorado River Over-Consumed

April 30, 2024

More water is taken from the Colorado River than it has to give. Better water use accounting made possible by Landsat provides needed guidance for difficult water use decisions.

A thumbnail for a video titled Data in Harmony, NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 Project

Data in Harmony: NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 Project

April 22, 2024

NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project is a groundbreaking initiative that combines data from Landsats 8 & 9 with the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A & 2B satellites.

Expanding OpenET Across Amazon Basin

April 16, 2024

The research teams who help sustain the largest freshwater reserve in the world are developing a new tool to promote more resilient farming systems in Brazil. The goal is to help farmers better handle changes in the water cycle, deal with droughts, and adapt to a changing climate.

Destructive Floods Afflict Tanzania

May 1, 2024

25 Years, 25 Images

April 26, 2024

Golden Fields in Romania

April 26, 2024

“With applied conservation programs, we’re using that [Landsat] imagery to say here are the areas that we can prioritize for conservation management, and here are areas that maybe we can let go. It’s a very powerful tool for getting conservation to happen.”

— Matthew Reiter, quantitative ecologist, Point Blue , Sep 24, 2015

“Our mapping techniques build on the historical Landsat record to provide highly needed information on regional scale and this helps in evaluating subtle changes in mangroves over a long period of time (trends) and to detect sudden changes due to natural catastrophes or dramatic anthropogenic impacts… [and] Thanks to the increased abundance of Landsat satellite images, it is becoming progressively easier to collect available images of mangrove habitats captured at low tide and high tide.”

— Hesham El-Askary, Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling & Observations and Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University , May 9, 2019

“I am a big fan of Landsat 8 satellite images as a resource when making maps.”

— Tom Patterson, National Park Service cartographer , Jun 13, 2019

“The results of the Scopus bibliometric analysis indicate that inland water quality remote sensing has been growing dramatically since its introduction in the 1970s…The most pronounced year-on-year jump occurs right after 2008, which corresponds to the public release of freely available Landsat imagery by NASA and the US Geological Survey…This result is consistent with previous research showing that for multiple earth observation fields, the release of the Landsat archive resulted in more fr…

— Simon N. Topp et al., 2020 , Jan 7, 2020

“The Landsat program relative to agriculture monitoring has been profound. The whole idea that Landsat could look at the condition of crops, the acreage of crops, seeing how they evolve, diseases… it just has been tremendously impactful for agriculture.”

— Vince Salomonson; Professor Emeritus, University of Utah | Landsat Project Scientist, 1977–1989 , Dec 15, 2022

“This research was only possible thanks to the free and open Landsat data policy.”

— Frank Paul, glaciologist , Nov 27, 2015

“Thanks to Landsat, we were able to dramatically improve our satellite base map in Google Earth and Google Maps on two separate occasions, first in 2013, and again in June 2016. Our most recent 15 meter-per-pixel global mosaic was made from over 1.5 million Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 images and forms the view of Earth you see across our mapping products for the first twelve zoom levels of the imagery basemap.”

— Chris Herwig, Google Earth and Earth Engine , Jul 28, 2017

“The fact that USGS and NASA makes this archive freely available, seems to me to be an inestimable service to the world, and the research community in particular.”

— Grayson Cooke, Australia-based media artist; commenting on the Landsat archive , Feb 22, 2018

“Satellites like those in the the Landsat program – which celebrates its 50th anniversary on July 23, 2022 – have become crucial for pinpointing urban risks so cities can prepare for and respond to extreme heat, a top weather-related killer.”

— Daniel P. Johnson, Associate Professor of Geography, IUPUI , Jun 14, 2022

“Landsat is the only satellite data archive that allows the quantification of vegetation and flooding dynamics relationships across such a large area. Key features unique to the Landsat archive that are paramount for our work include the archive’s temporal depth and detail provided by over a quarter century of systematically acquired time series of imagery at management-relevant spatial resolution.”

— Dr. Mark Broich, Geospatial Analysis for Environmental Change Lab, University of New South Wales , Dec 15, 2016

“The opening of the Landsat archive in 2008 was pivotal… We now have the best available map of disturbances for the United States.”

— Sean Healey, an ecologist with the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station , Dec 23, 2019

“The tracking of over-irrigated areas for targeting irrigation advisory texts was completely dependent on Landsat TIR data.”

— Indira Bose, Wolf Water Resources , Apr 20, 2021

“One of the things we like about the [Landsat] satellite is that as it orbits the Earth it is calibrated consistently so we have a globally constant picture that we can make comparisons—apples to apples—of what’s happening. We can drill down to countries, even parks, and say this is what is happening at a local scale. That is another really powerful part of this big data story.”

— Matt Hansen , Oct 21, 2015

“The future looks really exciting…”

— Curtis Woodcock, on Landsat science and applications , Jul 9, 2015

“It’s a fundamental resource for the Australian community. It’s used at local government level, state government level, and national levels. It’s our most important Earth-observing satellite with out a question in my mind.”

— Adam Lewis, Geoscience Australia’s Acting Chief Scientist, on the Australian archive of Landsat data , Jan 2, 2018

“The Landsat satellites have provided an unprecedented volume of high quality medium-resolution imagery spanning more than 30 years. Without this record it would be exceedingly difficult to place presently observed changes in ice discharge into a longer-term context.”

— Alex Gardner, NASA JPL , Dec 18, 2015

“Tropical deforestation plays a big role in global climate cycles… without the transparency of Landsat satellite data is difficult to put your finger on changing trends.”

— Douglas Morton, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , Feb 25, 2015

“The fact that USGS and NASA makes this archive freely available, seems to me to be an inestimable service to the world, and the research community in particular.”

— Grayson Cooke, Australia-based media artist; commenting on the Landsat archive , Feb 22, 2018

“Landsat is an invaluable tool for people working in our field of community wildfire safety.”

— Zeke Lunder, a pyrogeographer and founder of Deer Creek GIS , Feb 19, 2019

“I don’t think anyone could have seen this before these new maps were developed.”

— Catherine Walker, referring to the discovery of the likely cause of glacier speed-up on Antarctica's Wordie Ice Shelf based on Landsat-derived glacier velocity maps , Sep 25, 2017

“What we’re able to do now is track the flow of the world’s ice from pole to pole and on every continent.”

— Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, talking about the Landsat 8-based GoLIVE project , Dec 21, 2016

“Landsat is the only operational satellite that combines thermal and optical data at the spatial resolution needed to assess water use and water rights, which is often at the level of individual agricultural fields.”

— OpenET website , Jun 1, 2023

“It’s really a new era for Landsat, in that we’re going to have two observatories with very similar capabilities and very similar—if not identical—performances operating together. And this is going to provide more data to the Landsat mission than we’ve ever had before.”

— Chris Crawford, Landsat 9 Project Scientist (USGS) , Feb 23, 2022

“Landsat and SRTM are my eyes on the ground. Without them I am totally blind. They are great gifts to humanity.”

— Alain Gachet, Radar Technologies International founder and modern humanitarian water diviner , Jan 28, 2015

The NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence. Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth’s resources and environment.