A new suite of science products has been released, including Burned Area, Dynamic Surface Water Extent, and Fractional Snow Covered Area. These new products span the USGS Landsat archive from 1982 to the present and leverage the U.S. Analysis Ready Data (ARD) data released in fiscal year 2017. The higher-level products support scientific research and applications associated with the study of long-term trends in natural or human-induced changes to the Earth’s land surface. They were developed by USGS scientists in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Landsat Burned Area product identifies fire locations and burned areas (e.g., fire occurrence) and is used to quantify trends and patterns, characterize drivers of fire occurrence, inform projections of future fire pattern behavior, and assist with assessments of fire impacts on natural and social systems. Dynamic Surface Water Extent provides aquatic scientists and water resource managers information on the existence and condition of surface water that is useful in determining impacts by large-scale land cover and land use changes, climate variability, and increasing water demands. Landsat Fractional Snow Covered Area provides per-pixel fractional snow cover maps that indicate the percentage of a pixel covered by snow to support the measurement and monitoring of snow cover patterns across topographically complex mountainous regions.
In fiscal year 2021, the launch of Landsat 9 will augment the daily acquisition rate of Landsat 8 for a combined total of approximately 1,500 scenes per day, which will be the highest in the history of the Landsat program. This will enhance the temporal depth and density of the U.S. ARD inputs into Landsat Science Products, providing operational and scientific users the opportunity to compare contemporaneous observations with historical trends to assess landscape resiliency and vulnerability to change associated with natural processes, land management policies, and land use practices.
All Landsat data products are available for download at no charge from EarthExplorer, GloVis, and LandsatLook Viewer. For additional information about the joint USGS/NASA Landsat program please visit the Landsat Missions website.
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An example of the new Landsat Science Products from U.S. Landsat Analysis Ready Data Tile H008 V002 acquired September 29, 2017, in Glacier National Park.