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SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC)

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) family of specifications helps standardize the way geospatial metadata is structured and queried. 

This page describes many STAC components - a browser, an API, samples, and tutorials. Review each section below to learn all about STAC. 

Return to Landsat Commercial Cloud Access Information

A "spatiotemporal asset" is any file that represents information about the Earth at a certain place and time. STAC is intentionally designed with a minimal core and flexible extension mechanism to support a broad set of use cases.

All Landsat data stored in the AWS cloud platform include SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) metadata. Key features of STAC metadata include:

  • Interoperability between satellite metadata (e.g., Landsat 8 + Sentinel 2 instruments)
  • Exposes data in a common, machine-readable JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format for both end users and internal processes
  • Includes direct links to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) objects
  • Provides the ability to quickly search large collections of data using spatial and temporal areas of interest
  • Lives alongside product-level metadata (Landsat Metadata (MTL), Extensible Markup Language (XML)
     

STAC Browser  

https://landsatlook.usgs.gov/stac-browser
The STAC browser is a web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows users to browse and review STAC records and thumbnails for Landsat data in the cloud. 
 

STAC Server API  

https://landsatlook.usgs.gov/stac-server
The Landsatlook STAC Server API is a RESTful API built on the STAC specification, enabling programmatic access to Landsat data catalogs. The API follows RESTful principles, making it intuitive and easy to use. It uses HTTP methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE for different operations such as querying, filtering, and updating metadata.

Key Features:

  • Search: Find data assets based on criteria like keywords, spatial extent, temporal range, and properties.
  • Explore: Browse available collections and retrieve detailed information about individual data assets, including format, coverage, and metadata. The results are presented in JSON format, resembling a tree-like structure that mirrors folders and files, facilitating easy navigation and interpretation.
  • Download: Access Landsat data as Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), designed for efficient storage and access of raster data in the cloud.
     

STAC Samples

Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 Scenes The files listed below contain STAC metadata for Level-2 Surface Reflectance and Surface Temperature data for Landsat 9 OLI/TIRS Path 95 Row 21, Acquired June 25, 2022. 


Landsat Collection 2 U.S. Analysis Ready Data (U.S. ARD) U.S. ARD STAC records provide reference to the Level-2 Albers scenes that are used in the production of each ARD tile and include a Landsat-ARD STAC extension that contains the fields related to the tiled data: grid_horizonal; grid_vertical; grid_region; scene_count; cloud_shadow_cover; snow_ice_cover; and fill. The samples listed below contain STAC metadata for Landsat 9 data of C2 ARD Alaska tile AK_H005V013 acquired July 2, 2022.  


Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Science Products The samples below contain STAC metadata for Collection 2 Level-3 science products.  

STAC Tutorials 

A number of tutorials have been established to help users better utilize Landsat data. The majority of them can be found at the USGS repository: 

These tutorials are also listed as Related Content section at the bottom of this webpage. 

General information on using STAC and STAC metadata can be found on the STAC GitHub Repo webpage or https://stacspec.org/. Occasional updates are made to STAC Metadata. Specifics about each update are listed at https://github.com/radiantearth/stac-spec/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

 

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