This year at the Fall AGU conference, 409 Landsat-related presentations were given (# based on mentions of “Landsat” in the title or abstract).

At AGU conferences, where scientists come together to share research about Earth and space science, Earth observation data is a common tool for discovery and analysis of our home planet.

In an interesting thread on twitter, Joe Morrison, a longtime geospatial thinker, now with the company Umbra, asked:

“After attending a few remote sensing talks at #AGU21 my first question is: do researchers overwhelmingly focus on medium/low resolution, global scale time series because that’s what’s available (Landsat/Sentinel, MODIS) or because that’s the most important thing to be working on?”

A lively discussion followed. A few Landsat-related answers from the discussion:

• “Landsat has nearly 40 years of data easily accessible, which is simply not possible for other platforms. Sentinel-2 has high frequency, and quite high resolution. But both are unencumbered, so they don’t need special access considerations…” —Alex Leith
• “I would say: (1) global, free and open; (2) time series with frequent revisit; (3) appropriate resolution for a lot of environment studies (10 m with S2); (4) Image quality and ARD products (Although Image quality could be first in fact, depending on the threshold behind)” —Olivier Hagolle
• “It’s also a matter of SNR and radiometric quality. Landsat, Sentinel2, MODIS, VIIRS, etc all —absolutely blow away— high-res and medium-res sats in terms of having high quality data with accurate radiometry…Every earth observation system makes tradeoffs. They’re different tools, and the big gov-funded platforms are *really* good at what they’re designed for, which is science.” —Joe Kington

Did you know?

Whether you are at AGU in person or participating virtually, you can visit the 2021 NASA Earth Science Exhibit.

Got a 3D-printed Landsat 9 from NASA prize draw!! (It’s fishing actually as you can see from the background of the pic.) Anyway I love it!😍 #AGU2021 #NASA #Landsat pic.twitter.com/nrr8t8bMae

— Wendy Tsai (@WendyTsai0420) December 15, 2021