Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Publications

Below is a list of the most recent EROS peer-reviewed scientific papers, reports, fact sheets, and other publications. You can search all our publication holdings by type, topic, year, and order.

After selecting any set of these criteria, click "Apply Filter" to view the search results.

Filter Total Items: 2442

Landsat-7 ETM+ radiometric calibration status

Now in its 17th year of operation, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper + (ETM+), on board the Landsat-7 satellite, continues to systematically acquire imagery of the Earth to add to the 40+ year archive of Landsat data. Characterization of the ETM+ on-orbit radiometric performance has been on-going since its launch in 1999. The radiometric calibration of the reflective bands is still monitored using on-b
Authors
Julia A. Barsi, Brian L. Markham, J. S. Czapla-Myers, Dennis L. Helder, Simon Hook, John R. Schott, Md Obaidul Haque

Radiometric calibration updates to the Landsat collection

The Landsat Project is planning to implement a new collection management strategy for Landsat products generated at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. The goal of the initiative is to identify a collection of consistently geolocated and radiometrically calibrated images across the entire Landsat archive that is readily suitable for time-series
Authors
Esad Micijevic, Md Obaidul Haque, Nischal Mishra

Validation of the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model version 3 over the conterminous United States

The ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model Version 3 (GDEM v3) was evaluated over the conterminous United States in a manner similar to the validation conducted for the original GDEM Version 1 (v1) in 2009 and GDEM Version 2 (v2) in 2011. The absolute vertical accuracy of GDEM v3 was calculated by comparison with more than 23,000 independent reference geodetic ground control points from the U.S. Nat
Authors
Dean B. Gesch, Michael J. Oimoen, Jeffrey J. Danielson, David Meyer

Landsat helps bolster food security

One of the cruelest, most complex narratives in the world today (2019) is written in the hunger of sub-Saharan Africa. When famine is the only yield from the scorched Earth, survival often depends on a heart-rending calculation—how far is the distant feeding center and how close is the nearest well?
Authors

Urban planners and urban geographers turn to Landsat for answers

Government organizations that manage and mitigate the continued growth of cities are looking increasingly to the sky for assistance.
Authors

Landsat brings understanding to the impact of industrialization

In his 1963 book, “The Quiet Crisis,” former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall lamented what he called the decline of natural resources in the United States under the advancements of industrialization and urbanization.
Authors

Landsat plays a key role in reducing hunger on earth

The United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs predicts 9.7 billion people will sit down every day to the global dinner table by 2050. If this prediction is correct, the world is going to need more crops, more livestock, and more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices.
Authors

A note on the temporary misregistration of Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2 Multi Spectral Instrument (MSI) imagery

The Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 sensors provide multi-spectral image data with similar spectral and spatial characteristics that together provide improved temporal coverage globally. Both systems are designed to register Level 1 products to a reference image framework, however, the Landsat-8 framework, based upon the Global Land Survey images, contains residual geolocation errors leading to an expect
Authors
James C. Storey, David P. Roy, Jeffrey Masek, Ferran Gascon, John L. Dwyer, Michael J. Choate

Divergent projections of future land use in the United States arising from different models and scenarios

A variety of land-use and land-cover (LULC) models operating at scales from local to global have been developed in recent years, including a number of models that provide spatially explicit, multi-class LULC projections for the conterminous United States. This diversity of modeling approaches raises the question: how consistent are their projections of future land use? We compared projections from
Authors
Terry L. Sohl, Michael Wimberly, Volker C. Radeloff, David M. Theobald, Benjamin M. Sleeter

Carbon and energy fluxes in cropland ecosystems: a model-data comparison

Croplands are highly productive ecosystems that contribute to land–atmosphere exchange of carbon, energy, and water during their short growing seasons. We evaluated and compared net ecosystem exchange (NEE), latent heat flux (LE), and sensible heat flux (H) simulated by a suite of ecosystem models at five agricultural eddy covariance flux tower sites in the central United States as part of the Nor
Authors
E. Lokupitiya, A. Scott Denning, K. Schaefer, D. Ricciuto, R. Anderson, M. A. Arain, I. Baker, A. G. Barr, G. Chen, J.M. Chen, P. Ciais, D.R. Cook, M.C. Dietze, M. El Maayar, M. Fischer, R. Grant, D. Hollinger, C. Izaurralde, A. Jain, C.J. Kucharik, Z. Li, S. Liu, L. Li, R. Matamala, P. Peylin, D. Price, S. W. Running, A. Sahoo, M. Sprintsin, A.E. Suyker, H. Tian, Christina Tonitto, M.S. Torn, Hans Verbeeck, S.B. Verma, Y. Xue

Damage and recovery assessment of the Philippines' mangroves following Super Typhoon Haiyan

We quantified mangrove disturbance resulting from Super Typhoon Haiyan using a remote sensing approach. Mangrove areas were mapped prior to Haiyan using 30 m Landsat imagery and a supervised decision-tree classification. A time sequence of 250 m eMODIS data was used to monitor mangrove condition prior to, and following, Haiyan. Based on differences in eMODIS NDVI observations before and after the
Authors
Jordan Long, Chandra Giri, Jurgene H. Primavera, Mandar Trivedi

Applications for General Purpose Command Buffers: The Emergency Conjunction Avoidance Maneuver

A case study is presented for the use of Relative Operation Sequence (ROS) command buffers to quickly execute a propulsive maneuver to avoid a collision with space debris. In this process, a ROS is custom-built with a burn time and magnitude, uplinked to the spacecraft, and executed in 15 percent of the time of the previous method. This new process provides three primary benefits. First, the plann
Authors
Robert J Scheid, Martin England