Videos

The Landsat archive is the world's longest continuously collected record of the Earth's surface. In mid September, it notched another milestone by adding its nine millionth scene. This particular image from north central Paraguay helps tell the kind of story that only a long historical record like Landsat can.

Data products from the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center have long informed the delivery of food aid through a partnership with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET).

An overview of LCMAP Collection 1 Science Products: Annual Land Cover Change

As fire season continues in the western United States let's look back at a number of incidents tracked by officials across California in August. These fires were captured during the day by Landsats 7 and 8, in natural color bands of the visible spectrum. Landsat sensors also record infrared wavelengths revealing burn scars and active fires.

In Russia's Extreme North, a widening chasm known as the Batagaika Crater provides a unique opportunity to study the past. Early declassified aerial images recorded the crater's growth in the 1960s and 1970s followed by multispectral sensor imagery captured by Landsat and Sentinel satellites, building a continuous view over the last 60 years.

In Montana, wildfire swept across Flathead Lake's 30 acre Bird Island in early August of 2020. Landsat 8 captured this imagery one day after the fire began. The satellite's short wave infrared and near infrared bands reveal the active fire covering approximately half of the island. Smoke obscures the remainder.

This summer in central India, a mystery in color emerged. In the space of just days, the surface of Lonar Lake turned bright pink, then returned to green. As scientists study the cause of the event, other lakes around the world offer clues.

Will my existing workflow still be supported? Landsat downloads will continue to be available via EarthExplorer, LandsatLook, and other familiar USGS tools as they are today, without a noticeable difference to the user. The Landsat record will also remain free and open, with downloads available at no charge to the user.
 

LANDFIRE (LF) Remap is the most comprehensive mapping effort in LF's history. This years-long effort included updating the base maps across the original data product suite to create LF's second base map product suite consisting of 28 vegetation and fuels layers. LF Remap products reflect circa 2016 ground conditions.

This video is a three-dimensional (3D) view of Lake Powell topobathymetric digital elevation model, which consists of topography (land elevation) and bathymetry (water depth). The 3D topobathymetric model was developed by the U.S.

Mount Nyiragongo is a stratovolcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s one of the most active in the world, having exhibited volcanic activity at least once every 3 months since May 17, 2002.
 

LCMAP Collection 1 includes 10 Science Products, offering different perspectives for the study of land change across the country, through time. The primary and secondary land cover products, provide important information on the most likely land cover class for each pixel. Their associated confidence products record the level of confidence in each classification.

Summer vacation plans changed for many in 2020. Whatever your plans, Landsat can take you on a virtual road trip. Landsat 8, in its sun-synchronous polar orbit, views every national park in the U.S. every 16 days and gathers more photographic data than the most ambitious of tourists.

 

In a remote part of the Sahara Desert in Egypt, center pivot irrigation fields fill the landscape. Thanks to the Landsat archive, we can see how dramatically this area has changed over the last 35 years. But until the growth in irrigation, this part of the world hadn't changed much from a satellite's perspective.

The Landsat series of Earth-observing satellites has been continuously acquiring land surface imagery since 1972. Over 10 million Landsat scenes are currently available for download. They are also accessible from a cloud environment, in a cloud optimized format that gives you more flexible, customized access.

The “LP DAAC Prospectus: 2019 to 2021” short video features the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), a key access point for global land remote sensing data.

Why does the GEDI orbit footprint look the way it does? GEDI produces high resolution laser ranging observations of the Earth's forests and topography. GEDI was deployed to the International Space Station in 2018, and captures data along the ISS orbit shown here.

London Bridge was indeed falling down. Set to be torn apart and replaced in the 1960s, this bridge across the River Thames was purchased by businessman Robert McCulloch in April 1968 and shipped across the Atlantic, to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, billed as the world's largest antique.

The Staten Island Industrial Park in New York is now home to warehouse and distribution centers for companies like Amazon and IKEA, seen here in imagery from Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. But aerial imagery from 1995 shows large oil storage tanks in the same location.

The study of the Earth's natural life cycles is known as phenology. Scientists track the emergence of shoots and leaves, blooming flowers and pollinators as phenological signals every spring. Spring has sprung earlier than usual in much of the United States this year.

Antarctica has been the source for a host of fascinating satellite imagery in recent months. We've offered scenes from the southern solstice, images of icebergs adrift, and shots of pooling meltwater during some of the warmest days on record for the frozen continent. An international team of scientists onboard a U.S.