In a effort to help sustainable development professionals learn more about Earth observation resources that can help with their work, the World Bank Group released an informational website focused on remote sensing.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, leading the U.S. delegation to the 2015 Ministerial Summit of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), today signed an agreement with Mexico serving as a regional milestone for international cooperation in using land-surface satellite images for the benefit of effective land use planning and sustainability.
Since late 2008, when Landsat earth observation images were made available to all users free of charge, nearly 30 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded through the U.S. Geological Survey portal – and the rate of downloads is still increasing.
On March 19, 2015 Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it was hosting Landsat 8 imagery. With the help of USGS and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, AWS started with a collection of over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes.
The U.S. Geological Survey announced today that it has made part of a huge national repository of geographically referenced USGS field photographs publicly available. USGS geographers developed a simple, easy-to-use mapping portal called the Land Cover Trends Field Photo Map.
The International Charter is a system that supplies free satellite imagery to emergency responders anywhere in the world.
Landsat 7, which launched on April 15, 1999, has been continuing to acquire land images worldwide for 16 years. Landsat 5 may hold the Guinness World Record for longest Earth-observing satellite at 28+ years, but Landsat 7 also has an impressive track record. In fact, Landsat 7 has now acquired over 2 million images.
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.
The European Commission and the United States signed the “Copernicus Cooperation Arrangement” which will facilitate data sharing from the Copernicus constellation of Sentinel Earth Observation satellites among a broad spectrum of users on both sides of the Atlantic.
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?
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.
More and more we hear the term “anthropocene” used to describe the current epoch of our planet when humankind has had a profound impact on Earth. This month, the U.S. Geological Survey has released a Landsat-based report and dataset on anthropogenic land use trends in the U.S. between 1974 and 2012.
Just four days after being lofted into orbit, Europe’s Sentinel-2A satellite delivered its first images of Earth, offering a glimpse of the ‘color vision’ that it will provide for the Copernicus environmental monitoring program.
Landsat 8 data users will be glad to hear that the new Landsat 8 Data Users Handbook is now available online in PDF format from USGS.
The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2A successfully launched into orbit last night from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana aboard a Vega rocket (10:52 p.m. local time; 01:52 GMT).
On June 18, 2015 in Canberra, Australia, the U.S. Geological Survey and Geoscience Australia signed a comprehensive new partnership to maximize land remote sensing operations and data that can help to address issues of national and international significance.
The USGS has begun production of higher-level (more highly processed) Landsat data products to help advance land surface change studies. One such product is Landsat surface reflectance data.
In his lightning talk Lagomasino proposed a challenge to help study deforestation by linking satellite imagery and ground-images gathered via crowdsourcing
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.
In support of the guidelines established through the Global Climate Observing System, the U.S. Geological Survey has embarked on production of higher-level Landsat data products to support land surface change studies. One such product is Landsat surface reflectance.
In Australia, the Unlocking the Landsat Archive (ULA) project has created a “living and accessible” archive of Landsat 5 and 7 data, for years 1998–2012.
In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey took 3.6 million images acquired by Landsat satellites and made them free and openly available on the Internet.
Last Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it is now hosting Landsat 8 imagery on its publicly accessible Simple Storage Service (S3).
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.
On March 13, 2015 at 4:00 pm CT, processing of Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) data resumed. The newly processed data includes the revised Calibration Parameter Files established after the mechanism control electronics (MCE) swap on March 2, 2015.
The Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) resumed normal imaging operations.
After extensive investigation and testing, the decision has been made to switch the TIRS Mechanism Control Electronics from the primary to redundant side on Monday, March 2, 2015.
A trio of Landsat calibration scientists—Brian Markham (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Jim Storey (Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies for USGS EROS) and Ron Morfitt (USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center) Landsat 8 Special Issue of the journal Remote Sensing.
The latest edition of the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD 2011) for Alaska is now publicly available. The extensive NLCD database continues to add to our understanding of where land cover change has occurred across the Nation over time. Derived from carefully calibrated, long-term observations of Landsat satellites, NLCD data are used for thousands of applications such as best practices in land management, indications of climate change, determining ecosystem status and health, and assessing spatial patterns of biodiversity.
On February 11, 2013, the Landsat 8 satellite rocketed into space to extend a four-decade legacy of Earth observations. A few months after launch, we published a composite of images that spanned 9,000 kilometers of land from Russia to South Africa. In celebration of the satellite’s second anniversary, the mosaic concept returns with a chilly twist, this time featuring a slice of the Arctic Circle.
Two years ago today, Landsat 8 blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base!
USGS released provisional Landsat surface reflectance products in December. Surface reflectance products correct for atmospheric distortions thereby providing “less hazy” images.
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.
