Images

On an average day during the fire season, multiple wildfires burn in the western United States. For example, 216 fires were active on July 7, 2017. Firefighters were battling 27 of these fires through ground and air support.

The Landsat archive, the world's longest continuously acquired collection of space-based, moderate-resolution land remote sensing data, has now surpassed 7 million scenes since Landsat 1 first began collecting data in July 1972.

This image of the Las Vegas /Lake Mead / Grand Canyon area was acquired on June 16, 2017, with Indian Space Research Organization’s Resourcesat-2 AWiFS sensor. Images of this region can be useful to help detect changes in vegetation and water availability for growing desert communities.

How many pictures have you taken with your smartphone? Too many to count? However many it is, Landsat 8 probably has you beat.

The 100 millionth Landsat scene downloaded from the Landsat data archive at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Landsat 8 scene was acquired on May 24, 2017 of WRS-2 Path 73, Row 87.

A wildfire ignited by lightning in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge on April 6, 2017, is persisting into May. Hot, dry weather and extremely dry fuels are making the fire difficult to contain. As of May 22, the blaze, also called the West Mims Fire, had burned 152,478 acres.

Today Mount Pinatubo is relatively quiet, and about 300 meters shorter than it was before the eruption. This Landsat image pair shows the mountain several months after the eruption and more recently in 2017.

Is Louisiana falling into the sea, or is the sea inundating Louisiana? It's actually a bit of both. To the inhabitants of a tiny island on the bayou, an island getting tinier by the day, it hardly matters.

A frantic-looking scene in northeastern Ethiopia shows the location of three tectonic plates shifting away from each other. In this region, Earth’s crust is rifting at 1 to 2 centimeters per year. New fissures opened in the Erta Ale shield volcano in January 2017, and this image from March 2017 shows the locations of the fresh lava.

This image of the New Orleans/Lake Pontchartrain area in Louisiana was acquired March 31, 2017, from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Resourcesat-2 LISS-3 sensor. Land loss and hurricane hazards are key landscape issues here. 

This is an image acquired with the Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor III on the Indian Space Research Organization's Resourcesat-2 satellite that is now available in the EROS Archive. It is the New Orleans/Lake Pontchartrain area and was acquired March 31, 2017.

After 5 years of drought, California finally got relief during the winter of 2016–2017 with much needed precipitation. One result of this additional moisture was a springtime abundance of wildflowers.

After 5 years of drought, California finally got relief during the winter of 2016–2017 with much needed precipitation. One result of this additional moisture was a springtime abundance of wildflowers in 2017. This Landsat 8 image shows a large area of wildflower "superbloom" just north of Los Padres National Forest in southern California.

Solar energy is booming worldwide, and these Landsat 8 images show three large solar energy farms.

Red and black seem to mar the icy glacial landscape of southern Iceland. The gray-black filaments are past glacial melting outbursts called jökulhlaups. These abrupt flooding events gush down this outwash plain called Skeiðarársandur, one of the world’s largest. The Skeiðarárjökull Glacier reaches down from the top left of the image.

Landsat's shortwave infrared (SWIR) band measures reduced moisture content in soil and vegetation. When combined with its near-infrared (NIR) band, which helps reveal actively growing vegetation, Landsat produces highly accurate images and maps of burned areas.

A feathery, blood red streak cuts across the heart of this image. The translucent red paint stroke is not actually a feature of the land. It is a cirrus cloud detected by Landsat 8’s cirrus band. This cirrus cloud, which hovers over the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, is invisible in natural color imagery.

This March 2017 Landsat 8 image shows massive burned scars in Kansas and Oklahoma. More than 730,000 acres of farm and ranchland were scorched by wind-driven wildfires that began March 6 and were finally extinguished on March 22.

Landsat 8’s shortwave infrared (SWIR) band is useful in viewing recent eruptions at Erta Ale volcano in northern Ethiopia near the Eritrea border.

Among countries with accelerated rates of deforestation—Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Uruguay, and Paraguay among them—Cambodia ranks above them all with an annual loss of 14.4 percent of its forests between 2001 and 2014, according to researchers at the University of Maryland, who used Landsat data to track their rates.

Landsat satellites have helped document retreating glaciers worldwide. In this 2017 Landsat 8 image, glacial retreat is revealed in the rugged wilderness region of Patagonia, site of the largest contiguous areas of ice cover outside Antarctica.