Landsat 8 Cloud Cover Assessment Validation Data

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This collection contains 96 Pre-Collection Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) terrain-corrected (Level-1T) scenes, displayed in the biomes listed below. Manually generated cloud masks are used to validate cloud cover assessment algorithms, which in turn are intended to compute the percentage of cloud cover in each scene.

Data citation:

U.S. Geological Survey, 2016. L8 Biome Cloud Validation Masks. U.S. Geological Survey, data release. doi:10.5066/F7251GDH.

Foga, S., Scaramuzza, P.L., Guo, S., Zhu, Z., Dilley, R.D., Beckmann, T., Schmidt, G.L., Dwyer, J.L., Hughes, M.J. & Laue, B. (2017). Cloud detection algorithm comparison and validation for operational Landsat data products. Remote Sensing of Environment, 194, 379-390. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2017.03.026.

Each file contains the Landsat 8 Level-1 data band files in .TIF format, the Quality band .TIF file, the metadata file (MTL.txt), and the manual masks in .img (ENVI) format.

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