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April 1, 2020- Landsat 8 Provisional Aquatic Reflectance Science Product Now Available

By Landsat Missions

The USGS has released an on-demand Landsat 8 Provisional Aquatic Reflectance Science Product that will be useful in monitoring water quality, mapping chlorophyll concentrations, and measuring the inherent optical properties of water.

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Example of the Landsat 8 Aquatic Reflectance Science Product
Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details
Left: Land surface reflectance natural color composite image (bands 4,3,2); Right: aquatic reflectance Band 2 (Blue band) image of San Francisco Bay, using data acquired by Landsat 8 (Path 44 Row 33) on October 7, 2018

The Aquatic Reflectance product measures the spectral distribution of visible solar-reflected radiation upwelling from the upper water column and is derived from Landsat Collection 1 Level-1 reflective bands. The product’s 30 meter spatial resolution  provides the aquatic remote sensing community the capability to map optically active components across inland and near-shore water bodies.

The provisional Aquatic Reflectance science product is currently available for Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) acquistions only (2013-present) through the USGS EROS Center Science Processing Architecture (ESPA) on-demand interface.

For more information please visit the Landsat Provisional Aquatic Reflectance web page.

This provisional Aquatic Reflectance product belongs to a suite of USGS research-quality, applications-ready, Landsat-derived science products aimed at reducing the burden of data processing for the user community.

Please visit the Landsat Science Products web page to discover other available no-cost Landsat-based science products provided by the USGS.