USGS Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) for the conterminous United States will start becoming available for download October 2017.
Landsat ARD are:
- Consistently processed to the highest scientific standards and level of processing required for direct use in monitoring and assessing landscape change.
- Generated in the Albers Equal Area (AEA) Conic map projection, processed directly from Landsat Level-1 AEA scenes through Landsat Level-2 products using the WGS84 datum.
- Processed to a common tiling scheme of uniform dimensions bounded by static corner points in a defined grid system (5,000 x 5,000 30-meter pixels).
- Packaged into product bundles and delivered as .tar files.
Figure 1. Landsat Analysis Ready Data Tile Scheme
Landsat ARD consist of these higher-level data products:
- Top of atmosphere (TA) reflectance
- Brightness temperature (BT)
- Surface reflectance (SR)
- Pixel quality assessment (QA)
Sample Landsat ARD products are available for download from https://www.usgs.gov/land-resources/nli/landsat/us-landsat-analysis-ready-data.
The Landsat ARD webpage also provides useful documentation and tools such as the Data Format Control Book (DFCB) and the path/row tile converter tool (coming soon).
