National Land Imaging Program

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientists and engineers are constantly pushing the envelope to improve remote-sensing data and their utility, says Matt Hansen, a Landsat Science Team (LST) member and professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center and its Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) partners have just released the second edition of the JACIE land remote sensing satellite compendium.

The accumulated wildfires engulfing miles of California countryside in the late summer of 2020 are historic in their collective size: more than 500 fires burning across hundreds of thousands of acres.

The next edition of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) will appear more quickly than previous editions, offer accuracy comparable to NLCD 2016, and include previously-unreleased historical information on imperious urban surfaces.

The U.S. Geological Survey took a bold step toward documenting change across the landscape with the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972. Since then, the orbiters have collected nearly five decades of imagery.

USGS Fire Science is fundamental to understanding the causes, consequences, and benefits of wildfire and helps prevent and manage larger, catastrophic events. USGS scientists and programs provide information and develop tools that are widely used by stakeholders to make decisions before, during, and after wildfires across the nation.

The Landsat satellites were designed to detect landscape changes over time. However, sometimes what Landsat needs to see on the Earth’s surface is no change at all.

More than a decade ago, Tom Loveland sat down to sketch out a few thoughts on land change and the Landsat archive.

The archive was and remains rich with history, adding new observations of the entire planet every eight days. But at that point, Landsat-based land change research was about comparing points in time – this year versus five years ago, to 10 years ago, and so on.

The USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection project has released a new suite of land-cover change products for the conterminous U.S.

Jim Lacasse, the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Landsat Mission Operations Project Manager out at the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, told the Eyes on Earth podcast crew a fascinating story the other day about satellite constellations

Evapotranspiration (ET) presents a difficult problem.

Evaporation from the Earth’s surface and transpiration from the leaves of plants accounts for about 60 percent of the water budget – a budget that has implications for agriculture and food security the world over.