How Landsat Helps New Mexico

New Mexico draws on the Landsat satellites, operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), for decisions about fire, water and land. A USGS fact sheet sets out three uses in the state.

Before and after wildfires

As temperatures warm, trees weaken and die faster, and across the West climate-stressed vegetation is burning in unusually large, severe fires. New Mexico is among the places affected.

Landsat data help land managers in two ways:

• Before a fire, by showing where fuel has built up and where a prescribed burn could clear it.
• After a fire, through burn maps that show where bare soil is now exposed to erosion, flooding and mudslides when rain follows. Sediment washing downhill and downstream can damage homes, fill reservoirs, and threaten endangered species and community water supplies. Maps made from Landsat images mark those risk areas so that work to reduce the damage can be targeted.

Tracking water use along the Rio Grande

Farms, towns, industry and recreation all depend on water in New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande Basin. With a changing climate, ongoing droughts and lower reservoirs, many communities are turning to groundwater.

Researchers use Landsat data to estimate how much water evaporates from soil and plant surfaces and how much plants transpire. That lets them measure water use on farm fields and in municipalities, which improves local water-management decisions.

Left: a Landsat 8 image from June 7, 2019, showing irrigated land along the Upper Rio Grande down to El Paso, Texas, and into Mexico. Right: for the same date, a USGS Landsat-derived surface temperature model estimates the percentage of water lost through evaporation and plant transpiration. USGS figure.

Looking after parks and landscapes

New Mexico is known for its scenery, natural history and cultural heritage. Landsat's two satellites cover the state every 8 days, and its archive runs back almost 50 years, so it can record how people and nature have changed the state's national parks. Park managers use that record to answer questions such as where disease is affecting forests and where drought is affecting biodiversity and ecosystems.

Landsat 8 image from August 2019 of the white sands of White Sands National Monument in southern New Mexico. USGS image.

Landsat for the whole country

The USGS National Land Imaging Program supplies satellite imagery and other remotely sensed data to government, business, universities and the public, with worldwide access to Landsat data through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center.

According to the fact sheet:

• Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing source among federal civilian agencies, and local, state, Tribal and federal agencies use it to monitor and forecast what happens on the land surface.
• A 2017 USGS study put the total annual economic benefit of Landsat data in the United States at $2.06 billion, far more than the cost of building and running it.
• Businesses build customer-specific applications on the data, and commercial imaging firms use it to refine their own products.
• Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 together give 8-day repeat coverage of the Earth's land. NASA and the USGS were reviewing a joint study to shape Landsat Next, the mission to follow Landsat 9.
• Consistent, accurate data offered at no cost let users study large areas and long-term change, and cloud computing tools now build Landsat into decision-support tools for government and industry.

Sources

• U.S. Geological Survey: "New Mexico and Landsat," Fact Sheet 2020–3060.
• Studies cited by the fact sheet: LANDFIRE frequently asked questions (2022); Senay and others (2019), on crop water use in the Upper Rio Grande Basin, Remote Sensing; Straub, Koontz and Loomis (2019), "Economic valuation of Landsat imagery," USGS Open-File Report 2019–1112; U.S. Department of the Interior (2020), on remote sensing for the National Park Service.