Videos

As fire season continues in the western United States let's look back at a number of incidents tracked by officials across California in August. These fires were captured during the day by Landsats 7 and 8, in natural color bands of the visible spectrum. Landsat sensors also record infrared wavelengths revealing burn scars and active fires.

In Russia's Extreme North, a widening chasm known as the Batagaika Crater provides a unique opportunity to study the past. Early declassified aerial images recorded the crater's growth in the 1960s and 1970s followed by multispectral sensor imagery captured by Landsat and Sentinel satellites, building a continuous view over the last 60 years.

In a remote part of the Sahara Desert in Egypt, center pivot irrigation fields fill the landscape. Thanks to the Landsat archive, we can see how dramatically this area has changed over the last 35 years. But until the growth in irrigation, this part of the world hadn't changed much from a satellite's perspective.

Landsat recently captured the most widespread meltwater pooling ever recorded on Antarctica's George VI Ice Shelf. Some melting is expected during the Antarctic summer, but the sheer extent of the stunning aqua ponds that have appeared amid the continent's warmest summer on record is remarkable.

The Shishaldin Volcano on the eastern edge of Alaska's Aleutian Island chain erupted with activity in January of 2020. The eruption on the island of Unimak sent an ash cloud nearly 5 miles into the sky on January 7th, sparking ash alerts for aviators, mariners, and residents of nearby communities.

It's winter in the northern hemisphere, but in Antarctica, summer has just begun. At Zucchelli Station the summer solstice occurred on December 22nd, 2019 at 5:19pm local time. The high temperature that day was a balmy 34 degrees Fahrenheit. These images from Landsat 8 show the distinct difference in sun angles cause by the change in seasons.

Wildfires burned across Lebanon in mid-October, 2019. A pair of images taken just ten days apart by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2A satellite show the burn scar from one of the larger wildfires. North of the fire scar is the country's capital, Beirut.

In September of 2019, a 315 ton iceberg known as D28 broke free from the Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The berg has a surface area of more than 600 square miles, roughly comparable to the size of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. It's the largest iceberg to calve from the ice shelf since the 1960s. (Imagery captured by Landsat satellites.)

Abnormally high spring rainfall and subsequent flooding in the Midwest had a season-long impact on cropland production. In these Landsat images of South Dakota growing vegetation is shown as green and unplanted areas appear pink. The difference between 2018 and 2019 is striking.

Satellite imagery shows the rupture and shifting of land near Ridgecrest, CA from the July 2019 earthquakes.

 

Before landing on the surface of the moon in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin needed a training ground that matched their destination's cratered surface.

A Landsat satellite image captured the flooding in Dell Rapids, SD in the Spring of 2019. It's remarkably similar to an aerial photograph of flooding 50 years earlier. 

 

This tutorial explains how to use the compare browse functionality in EarthExplorer to preview Landsat scenes prior to downloading. 
 

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor is located onboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor is located onboard the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and data products created by NASA provide a continuation of the MODIS data heritage.

Observe changes in land surface temperature over the course of 2017, with Terra MODIS images. The images were created using the 8-day composite Terra MODIS LST data product (MOD11C2).

February 11 will mark the 5th anniversary of the launch of Landsat 8! 

Since 2013, over 1.1 million scenes have been acquired, adding to the Landsat archive which started almost 45 years ago, and continue to help support studies in agriculture, forest and water quality/use/management, natural disasters, and land change. 

This video focuses on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Version 6 Thermal Anomalies and Fire data distributed by NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC).

This video focuses on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Version 6 Thermal Anomalies and Fire data distributed by NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC).

This video focuses on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Version 6 Thermal Anomalies and Fire data distributed by NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC).

Landsat Collections: Providing a Stable Environmental Record for Time Series Analysis

In this tutorial, we will show you how to use some advanced features in the LandsatLook Viewer. The site can be found at: http://landsatlook.usgs.gov/