10th Anniversary of Landsat's Free & Open Data Policy
Detailed Description
Leaders in the field of remote sensing discuss working with Landsat data since it began in 1972. With the change to a free and open policy 10 years ago, new and exciting possibilities have opened up.
Details
Date Taken:
Length: 00:03:10
Location Taken: Sioux Falls, SD, US
Video Credits
Producer: Steve Young
Transcript
JOHN SCHOTT: When I first
started working Landsat,
you got film transparencies,
so it wasn't digital data.
It was digital here, but the
world couldn't handle digital
data so, the first thing we
did when we downlinked the
digital data was write it
back to analog and
distribute film.
MARTHA ANDERSON: Our
data storage was tiny and
we couldn't process a lot of
imagery so we were kind of
working on individual scenes.
And we were also paying a
lot of money per scene and
you had to have funding
to support this.
JOHN: A graduate student's
career was often one
Landsat image, they spent
their whole career on that
one Landsat image.
JIM CAMPBELL: At our
university we had 4 or 5
images that we owned ourselves.
If we had an image we had to
keep using that same image in
our classes or for this purpose
or that purpose over and
over again.
TOM LOVELAND: The work
was restricted to the data
that an individual could
afford, rather than the
imagery that were really
needed to solve a problem.
The methods, the approaches
we used and the size of the
problems we were trying to
solve were restricted in time,
in space, and in
complexity.
BARBARA RYAN: People
both in NASA and the USGS
dating back to 1972 when the
first satellite went up, really
at that time felt that the data
aught to be broadly and
openly available.
TOM: The big push to make
Landsat data free came from
Barb Ryan. She began to realize
the potential that it could have
on impacting Landsat use
around the world.
So she became the force to
make that happen.
BARBARA: Obviously the
internet came into being
and so instead of sending
out scenes on physical tapes
all of the sudden you could
distribute data over the web.
KASS GREEN: Ever since that
happened, to see the
explosion in the use of Landsat
has been amazing, especially
the multi-temporal applications.
The things that we can do
with multi-temporal.
TOM: We've had this interesting
convergence of analytical
capabilities, computing capabilities,
better imagination, and of course
all surrounded by serious
problems that need to be solved.
I think we're poised to really
start a more real-time focus
on understanding the
condition of the earth.
JOHN: We can now look at the
world. Before we said we could
look at the world, but the
reality was it was locked
away in an archive and we
didn't have access to it.
So I think that clearly is a
huge change.
BARBARA: The policy was a
paradigm shift for the world.
There's no doubt about it.
KASS: I think Landsat's
healthier now as a program
than it's ever been, and that
is because it's so widely used.
JOHN: The archive is just
going to continue to yield
good information, good science,
better management, reduce
costs. The biggest contribution
of Landsat will be that archive.