Category: Data

News Archive

A Discovery That May Make Daily Calibration Possible

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.

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Imaging the Past

Today, we are getting richer and more plentiful information about Earth’s land surface than ever before. But amid all of this modern Earth observing splendor, one truism remains: No sensor can image the past.

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#Landsaturated

Government agencies, research universities, independent hackers, coding bootcamp grads, do-good dev shops, swarms of startups, and multi-billion dollar defense contractors are all furiously building Landsat Viewers.

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Tracking Global Surface Water Dynamics with Landsat

At #AGU15, Amy Hudson, from the University of Maryland College Park, presented a poster about her work to develop a global surface water dynamics map for the years 2000–2014 using data from three Landsat satellites. We spoke with her about this effort.

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Measuring Movement at the Bottom of the Earth

Alex Gardner, a Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has used 30 years of Landsat data—some 3 million scenes—to measure the velocity of Antarctica’s ice sheet. He spoke with us about the work he is presenting at #AGU15.

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Detecting Landslides in Nepal with Landsat

Justin Roberts-Pierel from the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, uses Landsat 8 to detect landslides in the Himalayas. He provided information about his studies at #AGU15. We talked with him about his work.

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Mapping Antarctic Rock Outcrops with Landsat 8

Alex Burton-Johnson, Martin Black, and Peter Fretwell from the British Antarctic Survey have used Landsat 8 data to create a new rock outcrop map for Antarctica, which will become part of the Antarctic Digital Database. The team presented their research at #AGU15.

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Visualizing Data—Landsat at the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has published a talk given by Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics from Carnegie Mellon and Matthew Hansen, a remote sensing specialist at the University of Maryland, that demonstrates how visualizing big data can revolutionize the way we understand and imagine the world.

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The Chesapeake Bay in 661 Million Pixels

Imagine you’re flying 438 miles above the Earth taking pictures and collecting information of everything below. What do you see? Now imagine you’ve been doing this non-stop for over 40 years. Do you notice any change?

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A forest by any other name? Semantics, carbon implications, and solutions

Using the world’s first global, Landsat-based 30-meter resolution map of tree cover, researchers found that ambiguity of the term “forest” has the potential to create 13 percent discrepancies in forest area maps. While ecologists have long understood the complexity comprised by the concept of “forest”, and while geographers have called for the term to be more uniformly defined across monitoring entities, no one had quantified the scope of the problem.

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Here's Looking at You Landsat, via @LandsatBot

Dr. Martin O’Leary is a glaciologist with Wales’ Swansea University. He spends most of his time modeling glacier movements and from time-to-time he uses Landsat data to check things out, to get a lay of the land—or glacier. As a pet project he conceived of @LandsatBot, an automated twitter account that tweets interesting looking Landsat 8 images each hour. We recently spoke with Dr. O’Leary about @LandsatBot.

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Wrangling a Petabyte of Data to Better View the Earth

When viewed from space, clouds largely obscure the Earth. It isn’t a matter of time of day, angle or distance. It’s just the way it is – unless, of course, you are gazing at the planet using Google Earth. The story of how Google Earth offers images of the planet — without letting clouds get in the way — began in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.

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Growing crop circles; Garden City, Kansas, 1972-2011. Landsat imagery over time can be used to help monitor groundwater usage from the Ogalalla Aquifer. Image credit: USGS

Landsat Seen as Stunning Return on Public Investment

Orbiting Earth more than 400 miles away in space, far from human view; recording repeated images of land around the globe for more than 42 years; offering customers petabytes of historical and current data for free, the Landsat program of Earth observing satellites could be seen as the personification of the most single-minded office worker — tirelessly systematic, yes, but after so many years, perhaps less than dramatic.

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