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Many factors affect the processing of the Landsat 8 data affected by this safehold event. These are listed below in order of the dates affected.  

1.  Landsat 8 Level-1 data that were processed from Real-Time (RT) to tiered (T1/T2) products from January 21 to the start of the safehold event on January 26 will be reprocessed this week into tiered products. (Please visit the Collection 2 Tiers section on this webpage to learn more about RT to T1/T2 processing.) 

2. Data acquired on January 26 just prior to the start of the safehold, to early January 29, will remain as 'engineering' to allow the CVT to evaluate further, and are not available to general public users on EarthExplorer. If it is determined that these data meet Landsat quality standards, they will be released at a later date. 

3. Data acquired after the safehold recovery (January 29 – present) will be processed into T1/T2 products this week.  

After the data are processed into Level-1 tiered products, they will become available for download from the various USGS data sources. After the Level-1 products are created, the processing of Level-2 products, Level-2 U.S. Analysis Ready Data (ARD), and Level-3 science products will begin. 

Newly processed scenes will include the updated processing date in the Product Identifier (bolded in this example: LC08_L1TP_226065_20230101_20230110_02_T1). Users are encouraged to double check the processing date of scenes acquired from January 26 – present, to ensure the most recent data are being used.

 Please contact USGS Customer Services with any questions about the data affected by the Landsat 8 January 2023 safehold event.  

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