Data Wrangling with Dana Ostrenga
April 9, 2025
Data interoperability expert Dana Ostrenga explains how government and commercial Earth observation satellites provide broader support to the scientific community when used together.
Data interoperability expert Dana Ostrenga explains how government and commercial Earth observation satellites provide broader support to the scientific community when used together.
Why do we calibrate Landsat data? We spoke with Brian Markham, a key figure of Landsat calibration science for four decades. He said that it all comes down to this: “If we’re using a system to quantify changes on the Earth, we must make sure the system we’re using is not changing.”
Landsat 9’s OLI-2 instrument was characterized in unprecedented detail using a new laser-based method of in-band spectral response testing. A continuous relative spectral response dataset and pre-launch testing details have been published in a recent paper.
An international group is working together to find the best atmospheric correction techniques for Landsat 8 and the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite series.
Montanaro and Gerace’s stray light “exorcism” has now placed the Landsat 8 thermal bands in-line with the accuracy of the previous (ghost-free) Landsat thermal instruments.
OLI-2 is being built by Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado.
A South Dakota State University research team led by imaging engineer Larry Leigh has completed the first worldwide search for new satellite calibration sites through a partnership with Google Earth. The one-year project was made possible through a $46,000 Google Earth Engine research award.
Rochester Institute of Technology researchers have solved a problem nagging NASA’s Landsat 8 Earth-sensing satellite.
< The Multispectral Scanner System The band-average relative spectral radiance responses of the Landsat-1 through -5 Multispectral Scanner System (MSS) instruments are provided
On Tuesday, Mapbox announced that it is at work incorporating atmospherically corrected Landsat 8 data into its constantly refreshed Landsat-live map. After ironing out a few remaining kinks, data processed through this automatic atmospheric correction will be incorporated into the publicly available Landsat-live layer.
Landsat is a key data input for many products developed and used in water resources, agricultural monitoring, land use and land cover monitoring, forest management, and development planning.
Shortly after the launch of Landsat 8, the calibration team noticed something strange: bright and dark stripes, or “banding” was showing up across certain images collected by the satellite’s Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). Prelaunch testing of the sensor had indicated that highly accurate measurements (within 1 Kelvin) with little “noise” could be expected—what was going on?
On public land in the Ivanpah Valley near the California/Nevada border, the world’s largest concentrated solar thermal plant sprawls across the desert landscape. Just on the other side of Interstate 15 (the long straight diagonal line) is the location of a Landsat calibration site.
Every full moon, Landsat 8 turns its back on Earth. As the satellite’s orbit takes it to the nighttime side of the planet, Landsat 8 pivots to point at the moon. It scans the distant lunar surface multiple times, then flips back around to continue its task of collecting land-cover information of the sunny side of Earth below. These monthly lunar scans are key to ensuring the land-imaging instrument aboard Landsat 8 is detecting light consistently. For a well-known and stable source of light, nothing on our planet beats the moon, which lacks an atmosphere and has an unchanging surface, barring the odd meteorite.
People. It takes a lot of people to build, launch, and operate a satellite, especially a satellite that regularly returns accurate scientific data. On February 11, 2013, Landsat 8 was successfully launched into orbit. Many of the people who worked hard to make Landsat 8 a success have recently been recognized as 2013 Robert H. Goddard Award recipients.
Landsat helps scientists comprehend what changes have occurred on Earth’s land surfaces. Since 1972, Landsat satellites have been amassing information about the land cover of our planet and land cover, as obscure as it may sound, is important for our understanding of big issues like water use, carbon stocks, and global crop production.
Landsat 8 was built to do something none of its predecessors had done before: look at the Moon. You may ask why an Earth-observing mission would want to image Earth’s natural orbiting celestial body. Well, it all goes back to getting good data of Earth.
By Laura E.P. Rocchio On the beautifully clear Monday morning of Feb. 11, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission made its way from California’s Vandenberg
Mar. 19, 2013 • The great strength of Landsat is its ability to let data users look at and analyze changes to the Earth’s landscapes from
[Source: European Space Agency] The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have joined forces to ensure that Sentinel-2 and the newly launched Landsat Data Continuity Mission
The great strength of Landsat data is its long record, the ability to look at our planet over the past 40 years and see what changes man and nature have wrought.
The Landsat Data Continuity Missions’s (LDCM’s) fully assembled Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument was tested under thermal vacuum conditions by the instrument vendor, Ball Aerospace
Special Topics: LDCM and LDCM Components The Calibration Subsystem for the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on LDCM uses both the sun and the absence of
Frank Padula and coauthor John Schott received two prestigious awards at the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At
Source: USGS Effective January 1, 2010, the calibration of the ETM+ thermal band was modified to correct for a lifetime gain error detected by the vicarious
