Sharq El Owainat, Egypt
Agriculture
Deserts
The Landsat satellites were designed to detect landscape changes over time. However, sometimes what Landsat needs to see on the Earth’s surface is no change at all.
This is the story of a key Landsat calibration test site that is being retired as a test site because of the extensive land use change taking place in that area.
Location
Apr. 23, 1985, Landsat 5 (path/row 177/44) — Sharq El Owainat, Egypt
Feb. 19, 2020, Landsat 8 (path/row 177/44) — Sharq El Owainat, Egypt
Sharq El Owainat, Egypt Additional Imagery & Stories
Earth As Art
The view of this region from Landsat is so fascinating, it’s the subject of two Earth As Art images. These and all Earth As Art images can be download...
Landsat’s Accuracy
The Sharq El Owainat airport is visible on the right side of these images. The runway appears in the 1997 image. Landsat’s accuracy is key to other sy...
Picking Calibration Sites
Engineers use test sites around the world to make sure Landsat imagery is consistent and accurate. These calibration test sites are regions on the Ear...
Watering the Sahara
One of the best test sites, named Egypt-2, was steadily reliable until around the late 1990s. In a vast expanse of Sahara Desert in southern Egypt, ce...
References
Abouelmagd, A., Sultan, M., Sturchio, N.C., Soliman, F., Rashed, M., Ahmed, M., Kehew, A.E., Milewski, A., and Chouinard, K., 2014, Paleoclimate Record in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, Sinai Peninsula, Egypt: Quaternary Research, v. 81, no. 1, p. 158–167, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yqres.2013.10.017.
ESA, 2019, Earth from Space—Egyptian Crop Circles: ESA Images of the Earth, accessed June 25, 2020, at https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/images-of-the-earth/featured-image-archive/-/article/egyptian-crop-circles.
Helder, D.L., Senior Calibration Advisor, USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, 2020, personal communication.
Helder, D.L., Basnet, B., and Morstad, D.L., 2010, Optimized identification of worldwide radiometric pseudo-invariant calibration sites: Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, v. 36, no. 5, p. 527–539, https://doi.org/10.5589/m10-085.
Hollier, A., 2017, Crop Circles in Sharq El Owainat: NASA Earth Observatory, accessed June 25, 2020, at https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/90937/crop-circles-in-sharq-el-owainat.