Videos

In May 2025, record rainfall in Australia's New South Wales created major flooding along the coast. In Taree, a mid-North Coast city, the Manning River reached a height of 6.4m on May 21st. The previous record of six meters was set back in 1929. The torrential rains have left almost 800 properties and counting uninhabitable in New South Wales.

Calibration and validation (cal/val) are essential steps to ensure that remotely sensed data are reliable for scientific use. Radiometric cal/val involves converting digital image pixel values to meaningful units and assessing their accuracy.  

The St. Marys River between Michigan and Ontario is typically frozen January through March. The US Army Corp of Engineers performs maintenance on regulated access channels (the Soo Locks) during the coldest months.

Steve Aichele, the National Geospatial Program Hydrography Management and Planning Lead, announced release of the Elevation Derived Hydrography Specification 2024 Revision A3 and updates on the following:   

This video is a recording of a previous webinar entitled: “An Introduction to Landsat Data Access and Processing in the Cloud!.” This webinar was recorded on April 17, 2025.

The world’s largest iceberg floats freely in the Southern Ocean.

Iceberg A23a is a 1,500 square mile ice mass larger than the state of Rhode Island. A23a weighs approximately 1 trillion tons and measures around 1,300 feet thick.

Steve Aichele, the National Geospatial Program Hydrography Management and Planning Lead, announced release of updated Elevation Derived Hydrography Specifications and publication of the following products and services: 

The USGS EROS Landsat archive recently reached a milestone of 12 million Landsat Collection 2 Level-1 products. These are available for download at no charge. The image representing this milestone displays a sprawling desert landscape and contains a multitude of agricultural, geological, and urban features.

Landsat satellites capture images of the Earth’s surface. While the sensors aboard Landsat capture a wide range of scientifically useful wavelengths, this collection reveals natural color imagery in the red, green and blue parts of the visible spectrum, as if viewed by the naked eye from 438 miles above the surface.

The 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP) database will initially be populated with the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) features, mapped to the new data model. The NHD-source features will be replaced with hydrography derived from the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) lidar and IfSAR data as it becomes available.

A large, round lake in Quebec, Canada, highlights the geography of an ancient impact crater.

In the late Triassic Period, a 3 mile wide meteorite struck northern Pangea at over 30,000 miles per hour.

The resulting crater is now 214 million years old, but the dramatic circular lake visible in 2024 Landsat imagery is a surprisingly recent feature.

Federal Fiscal Year 2024 was the first full operational year for the 3D Hydrography Program. We made significant progress in a number of areas, publishing final versions of legacy products, and developing processes for the new program. This presentation will provide an overview of what was accomplished in FY24 and what is planned for FY25. 

This video is a recording of a previous webinar entitled: “The New Annual (1985-2023) National Land Cover Database: Improving on a 30-year Legacy.” This webinar was recorded on October 24, 2024 at the USGS EROS.

The Klamath River, flowing from the high desert interior of Oregon and through the redwood forests of California, once produced large runs of salmon and trout. However, the construction of hydroelectric dams, beginning in 1918, blocked fish migration, encroached on Indigenous culture, and impacted water quality.

The USGS-NFHP Webinar on the 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP) and The National Map (TNM) provided a deep dive into the current state and future direction of USGS hydrography and elevation data, focusing on the replacement of legacy datasets with highly accurate, 3D-enabled data.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center maintains one of the largest civilian collection of images of the Earth’s land surface. At EROS, we study land change and produce land change data products used by researchers, resource managers, and policymakers across the nation and around the world.

This National Map training video is an introduction to using the LidarExplorer application to easily access lidar data and derived products. In LidarExplorer, you can search for lidar projects, digital elevation models, and lidar point cloud files to meet your needs.

The U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass Amherst), in cooperation with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), began a series of studies in 2019 to develop a web-based statewide hydraulic modeling tool to provide preliminary culvert designs for stream-crossing projects in Massachusetts.

Prolonged drought has lowered water levels in Laguna Bustillos in Chihuahua State, Mexico, killing thousands of fish.

Rangeland managers need information on the current vegetation condition and how the landscape has changed through time.

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