National Land Imaging Program
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Our Nation’s economic security and environmental vitality rely on continuous monitoring of the Earth’s continents, islands, and coastal regions in order to record, study, and understand land change at local, regional, and global scales. The USGS National Land Imaging (NLI) Program helps meet this need.
Image of the Week
The punishing derecho storm that struck the Midwest in early August had an immediate impact on Iowa's farm fields. But it took weeks for the long-term damage to appear in satellite imagery.
Derecho StormLandsat 9 Road to Launch
Launching in 2021, Landsat 9 is a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Learn about the process of building Landsat 9 and how it will extend Landsat's unbroken record of our planet to over half a century.
Road to LaunchMore to Explore
Follow these links to learn more about our remote sensing research partnerships, how to access and download data, our image collections, news articles, and more.
News
EROS Offers Two Postdoctoral Land Change Fellowships for 2021
The USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative is offering two Mendenhall Fellowships to improve its land change products.
The International Charter: 20 Years of Disaster Monitoring
The latest “Eyes on Earth” podcast is about the 20th anniversary of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters, a global organization made up of 17 member agencies, including the USGS, that provides free of cost satellite imagery for National Disaster Management Agencies to deal with...
Doucette Promotes Parallels to LCMAP, Capacity Building in Talks About EarthMAP
EROS Integrated Science and Applications Branch Chief Pete Doucette has been talking to groups about the Earth Monitoring, Analyses, and Prediction initiative (EarthMAP) as part of his outreach interests, emphasizing several important themes when he does.
Publications
Landsat Collection 2 geometric calibration updates
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) changed the management and delivery of Landsat products to the public in its archive through the implementation of Collections. The Collections process ensures consistent data quality through time and across all the Landsat sensors with a few modifications to the metadata. The consistent data products from...
Rengarajan, R.; Choate, Michael; Storey, James C.; Franks, Shannon; Micijevic, Esad
2020 Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation—Remote sensing satellite compendium
The Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) is a collaboration between five Federal agencies that are major users and producers of satellite land remote sensing data. In recent years, the JACIE group has observed ever-increasing numbers of remote sensing satellites being launched. This rapidly growing wave of new systems creates a need...
Ramaseri Chandra, Shankar N.; Christopherson, Jon B.; Casey, Kimberly A.
Economic valuation of landsat imagery
Landsat satellites have been operating since 1972, providing a continuous global record of the Earth’s land surface. The imagery is currently available at no cost through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). A previous USGS study estimated that Landsat imagery provided users an annual benefit of $2.19 billion in 2011, with U.S. users accounting for...
Straub, Crista L.; Koontz, Stephen R.; Loomis, John B.