Landsat in the Cloud: COGs and Notebooks

In the past, users spent 80% of their time downloading and preparing Landsat data to be processed. With Landsat in the cloud, you can get direct access to stream the Landsat archive without the need to download large amounts of files, by leveraging the Cloud Optimized Geotiff, or "COG". COGs are just like the Geotiff that you're used to only unpackaged and internally tiled to enable area of interest requests. This allows users to get at the specific pixels they need without processing the pixels they don't. Along with the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog COGs help to open up new processing workflows and utilization of third party open source tools to work with the data. Instead of processing files on your computer, you can run custom algorithms using open source tools to perform analysis on cloud-based Landsat data without downloading and maintaining large amounts of data for your studies. You can share your code through notebooks with the scientific community, and they will be able to replicate your work without downloading the data themselves. Landsat data in the cloud will continue to be provided at no charge to everyone through traditional search interfaces such as Earth Explorer and Landsat Look. Users wanting to use cloud services will need to agree to the terms of service of the cloud, which may include costs to the user.

[User] Streamed Landsat data sounds exactly like what I need. I can skip past all the storage and processing, and just save the final product of my work, which is all I really need for publication. I can also share my notebooks with others, and they can follow the exact steps I took, right?

[Cloud] Right. This is a notebook. Notebooks contain snippets of code that can be run to query, access and process data. Landsat data can be processed to render 3-band composites, calculate spectral indices, create histograms and custom layouts, and export results. All of this can be done on the fly using only the data the user specifies. The EROS team is excited about these changes and we hope you are too.