Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Urban heat islands occur in areas containing more impervious surfaces and fewer natural environments. The day and night surface temperature is higher in urban heat islands than in surrounding areas. During heat waves, this can lead to greater numbers of heat-related illnesses and deaths. Landsat satellites collect data on surface temperature and vegetative change that can

The Earth As Art project began in the early 2000s, and its original intent remains the same: to produce images that do not look like satellite images at first glance. Earth As Art shows not only what satellites capture in the visible wavelengths of light you and I can see, but also what’s hiding in the invisible wavelengths that Landsat sensors can detect in the infrared

The Earth As Art project began in the early 2000s, and its original intent remains the same: to produce images that do not look like satellite images at first glance. Earth As Art shows not only what satellites capture in the visible wavelengths of light you and I can see, but also what’s hiding in the invisible wavelengths that Landsat sensors can detect in the infrared

The National Land Cover Database, or NLCD, was the first and remains the most well-known set of satellite-based land cover mapping products released by EROS. It sorts the each 30-by-30-meter plot of land in the United States into a land cover class, such as cropland, pasture, high-intensity developed, deciduous forest, and the like. It also includes information on

A 1.1 mile long 509 foot tall concrete dam spanning the Blue Nile River is set to become the largest hydropower plant in Africa. Under construction since 2011, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is expected to produce around 16,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually when fully complete in 2023 providing power to 60% of Ethiopia's estimated 115 million people.

Mapping fire perimeters is important work. It guides post-fire restoration efforts, fire mitigation strategies, and helps track of trends in burn severity over time. In the past, many of Canada’s fire agencies relied heavily on techniques like sketch mapping, which estimate burned area without exact measurements. In the pre-satellite era, pilots would sometimes fly over

The LANDFIRE (LF) program is working to increase the frequency of product releases and to reduce the latency of the LF products by producing annual version releases that reflect data less than one year behind current conditions and represent data conditions homologous to the growth that one would expect in areas of change/disturbances up to the year when the products are

If you're watching this video, you're probably using a lithium battery. Smartphones, tablets and laptops all rely on lithium metal to store energy. It comes from surface mines or brine ponds, found in places like Australia, China and the United States. One of the leading sources for this increasingly valuable resource is the South American nation of Chile.

On the

The invasive species hemlock woolly adelgid is a threat to eastern hemlocks, filling some southeastern U.S. forests with what are called “gray ghosts” of the trees. Until recently, the insect had stayed in the southern part New York, but late last summer, an infestation was discovered in the Adirondacks. On this episode of Eyes on Earth, a New York university researcher

About 15 million people rely on the Delaware River Basin for drinking water, including residents of Philadelphia, PA, Camden, NJ, and Wilmington, DE. What might happen to the water supply if climate change and population growth continue unabated? How might that impact land cover and land use patterns? Those are the kinds of questions scientists at EROS looked to answer in

In the past, users spent 80% of their time downloading and preparing Landsat data to be processed. With Landsat in the cloud, you can get direct access to stream the Landsat archive without the need to download large amounts of files, by leveraging the Cloud Optimized Geotiff, or "COG". COGs are just like the Geotiff that you're used to only unpackaged and internally tiled