Landsat’s Critical Role in Water Management
Water is essential for life. A third of Earth’s populace has unreliable access to clean water. With current population growth and environmental trends, the U.N. Environmental Program estimates that 1.8 billion people will face water scarcity by 2025. Water means survival for people and other species we rely upon to thrive, making proper stewardship of our water resources vital. Good decisions require good data. Since 1972 the Landsat series of satellites has been providing such data. Landsat-based decisions on how to manage limited water resources have impacted millions of people worldwide. From finding water for refugees in arid nations to reducing pollution in our national waterways, Landsat enables decisions that directly help people.
Establishing Historical Land Cover
USGS and NASA researchers teamed together in a highly ambitious effort to reconstruct historical land cover and biophysical parameters of the eastern U.S. Their resulting data sets will support future
Landsat Helps Establish Bushfire Impact on Water Yields in Australia
Source: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation In the summer of 2002-03, bushfires burnt through 700,000 ha of forests in northeast Victoria in Australia. This region supplies 38 percent of
Landsat Helps Show That Forests Damaged by Hurricane Katrina Become Major Carbon Source
With the help of Landsat and MODIS data, a research team has estimated that Hurricane Katrina killed or severely damaged 320 million large trees in Gulf Coast forests, which weakened
Sensor Synergy: Great Lakes Algae Monitoring
A rare bird has been flying over the Great Lakes recently, and it isn’t migrating or searching for prey. This hawkeyed species is a Learjet aircraft outfitted with an advanced
Landsat Watches as China Constructs Giant Dam
Some call it the eighth wonder of world. Others say it’s the next Great Wall of China. Upon completion in 2009, the Three Gorges Dam along China’s Yangtze River will
Precious Resources: Water & Landsat’s Thermal Band
Contributor: Laura Rocchio “Chronic water supply problems in many areas of the West are among the greatest challenges we face in the coming decades.” Mark Limbaugh, the U.S. Department of
