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December 23, 2014 - Provisional Landsat 8 Surface Reflectance Data Available

Provisional Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) Surface Reflectance (SR) data products are now available through the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center Science Processing Architecture (ESPA) On Demand Interface and EarthExplorer. *

As currently produced for Landsat 4-5 and Landsat 7 scenes, product options such as top-of-atmosphere (TOA) reflectance, surface reflectance (SR), and SR-based spectral indices are available for Landsat 8 scenes through the ESPA interface. Please Note: currently, only Landsat 8 scenes acquired from April 11, 2013 (DOY 101) through December 18, 2014 (DOY 352) can be processed to Surface Reflectance, due to the recent change of the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) acquired data. Please see the December 22, 2014 Landsat Mission Headlines for more details.

* Surface Reflectance (SR) data only for individual scenes can be selected using EarthExplorer, under the Landsat CDR Data Sets. These requests will be sent to the ESPA On-Demand interface for processing and data delivery.

It is important to note that Landsat 8 scenes will not be processed with the same algorithm used for Landsat 4, 5, and 7 scenes. A new algorithm has been developed to take advantage of Landsat 8’s unique characteristics.

The L8SR algorithm currently uses the scene center for the sun angle calculation and then hardcodes the view zenith angle to 0. The solar zenith and view zenith angles are used for calculations as part of the atmospheric correction. Future plans may modify both LEDAPS and L8SR to calculate sun angles on a per-pixel basis.