Since then AWS has added all newly collected Landsat 8 images—some 700 images per day—within hours of their collection and processing by USGS. On Nov. 9 at the #SatSummit meeting in Washington, D.C., AWS’s Jed Sundwall shared that in the first 150 days of Landsat being on AWS over 500 million Landsat data requests had been made from around the globe.
AWS agreed to host up to one petabyte of Landsat data on its servers in support of the White House’s Climate Data Initiative. This allows researchers, scientists, cartographers, and data hobbyists to use cloud-computing to easily access and process large quantities of Landsat data.
Sundwall, writing for the Amazon Web Services Official Blog in March, stated “We hope to accelerate innovation in climate research, humanitarian relief, and disaster preparedness efforts around the world by making Landsat data readily available near our flexible computing resources.”
He added, “Because of Landsat’s global purview and long history, it has become a reference point for all Earth observation work and is considered the gold standard of natural resource satellite imagery.”
Note: The Landsat data requests include requests for imagery as well as imagery metadata.
Further Reading:
+ More Ways to Get Landsat Data
![Natural-color Landsat 8 image of an algae bloom in Lake Erie. The bloom appears green and contrasts with blue water.](https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/erie_oli_2017269-1024x576.jpg)
Be Part of What’s Next: Emerging Applications of Landsat at AGU24
Anyone making innovative use of Landsat data to meet societal needs today and during coming decades is encouraged to submit and abstract for the upcoming “Emerging Science Applications of Landsat” session at AGU24.