Images

The roughly west-east trail of destruction from the April 27, 2011, Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado is clearly visible in these Landsat images. This was one of 358 recorded tornadoes during the April 25-28, 2011, tornado outbreak, the most severe in U.S. history.

McKinley is the USGS's flagship supercomputer installed and housed at the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. Estimated peak computational performance is expected to be ~660 Tflop/s. 

Learn more here: USGS McKinley Supercomputer

Landsat 5 image of Gascoyne, West Australia. The image was acquired on December 12, 2010.

Learn more about Landsat at www.usgs.gov/landsat

Example of the Landsat 4-5 TM Collection 2 level-1 product. This Landsat 5 image was acquired on October 6, 2010 near Seattle, Washington and is shown as a natural color composite using the red, green, and blue bands (bands 3,2,1).

Example of the Landsat 4-5 TM Collection 2 level-2 science products. Left: Landsat 5 level-2 surface reflectance image. Right: Landsat 5 level-2 surface temperature image. The data was acquired on October 6, 2010 (path 47 row 27).

A scene at the edge of a suburban housing development and farmland in Frederick County, Maryland.

This ASTER image acquired August 11, 2010, shows a massive ice island dominating the center of the image that had broken off of the Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland on August 5, 2010. This false-color image of the ice island displays ice in light blue, water as nearly black, and clouds as nearly white.

R. Greg Vaughan of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center does field work at Yellowstone National Park. Vaughan monitors thermal features in his role as the remote sensing lead for the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. USGS photo

A study in shades of blue and brown is actually one of the harshest landscapes on Earth. This glimpse of Africa's Sahara Desert, located near where the borders of Mali, Niger, and Algeria converge, is truly a no man's land, a world of sand and rock without roads or settlements.

Tin Bider is an ancient and eroded meteor crater on the Tin Rhert Plateau in the Algerian Sahara. Tin Bider is nearly 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) in diameter and was caused by a meteorite impact in this region of northern Africa roughly 70 million years ago. The other streaks near the crater are unrelated to the impact event.

This abstract in browns and grays from central Algeria shows that some parts of Africa's Sahara Desert contain much more than dunes of wind-blown sand. Barren ridges and fragmented mountains (lower right) border a vast expanse of arid plains etched with a complex system of dry streambeds.

Like a watercolor in which a brushstroke of dark green has bled into a damp spot on the paper, southern Africa's Okavango River spreads across the pale, parched landscape of northern Botswana to become the lush Okavango Delta.

In the American Southwest, transitions from one ecosystem to another can be dramatic and abrupt. This certainly is true in northern Arizona, USA, where the parched Painted Desert, shown here in a palette of purples, adjoins Sitgreaves National Forest (shades of green), a realm of pine woodlands with abundant wildlife.

Landsat 5 image of the Mt. Redoubt area on March 26, 2009 at 1:07 PM AKDT. The false color image shows the large brown ash cloud extending over the Cook Inlet and the western Kenai peninsula (right sid of image). The image also shows a whiter steam and gas plume rising from the summit of Redoubt Volcano (near upper center).

Landsat satellite dish inside radome at USGS EROS

Near the western edge of the Sahara Desert is a feature that resembles a large eye when viewed from space. The Eye of the Sahara, also known as the Richat Structure or Guelb er Richat, is a symmetrical dome of eroded sedimentary and volcanic rock. The outermost rings measure approximately 40 km (25 miles) across.

Comparison of color aerial photography with airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) imagery in an area west of Lake Tahoe, California. (A) Color aerial orthophoto for part of range front along eastern base of Mt. Tallac with geomorphic features obscured by dense forest cover. (B) Same scene, first-return LiDAR imagery.

Central Asia's Tibetan Plateau is justifiably nicknamed "the roof of the world"-its average elevation is more than 4,500 meters (14,764 feet). It is the world's highest and largest plateau, covering an area roughly four times the size of Texas. Tectonic forces have long shaped the Tibetan Plateau's crumpled and uplifted mountain ridges.

During the last ice age, Akimiski Island in Canada's James Bay lay beneath vast glaciers that pressed down with immense force. As the climate changed and the ice retreated, Akimiski began a gradual rebound.

Skeletal extensions of land reach like bony fingers across a section of Liverpool Bay along the northern edge of Canada's Northwest Territories. Only small villages are thinly scattered in this remote and inhospitable region of Arctic tundra bordering the Beaufort Sea.

This Landsat 7 image captures the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, MD, areas. Washington, D.C., lies in the center of the image along the Potomac River. Baltimore, in the upper-right portion of the image, is located on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay.

Landsat Missions Web Site