The morning after an EF-4 tornado cut a 30-mile path across north-central Illinois in April 2015, Landsat 8 photographed the scar. The image helped assess the damage — one of many ways the satellites' view from space helps "The Prairie State."
Landsat 8 image of April 10, 2015, showing the EF-4 tornado track northwest of Rochelle, Illinois. Credit: National Weather Service.
The state
More than 12 million people live in Illinois, including in Chicago, the third-largest city in the country. Yet farmland covers about 75 percent of the largely flat land, and corn and soybeans are now far more common than the tallgrass prairie that once covered the state, though remnants survive. Beaches line the Lake Michigan shore in the northeast, more than 80,000 miles of rivers and streams run through and along the state, and forests fill several million acres, mostly in the west and the rolling hills of the south.
Three uses
| Use | Example |
|---|---|
| Cropland | 89 percent of Illinois farmland is rated "prime" by the USDA, the best land for crops. Landsat feeds the USDA's annual Cropland Data Layer — what is planted, how much, where, and where land use has changed — and the Illinois Department of Agriculture has long used Landsat land cover data, including in a Landscape Classification Project with the USDA and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. |
| Urban growth and heat | Chicago State University researchers used Landsat to map where urban sprawl had spread across northeastern Illinois and to model where it would likely go through 2030 (Friehat and others, 2015). Landsat can also pinpoint urban heat islands — paved areas with little nature that run hotter day and night and put residents at risk of heat illness — and technology organizations have used the Landsat archive with the city of Chicago to assess heat-reduction efforts (Letavish and Vecchetti, 2020). |
| Disasters | Satellite images give a fuller view of floods, fires and tornado damage, helping response and preparation. |
The 2020 Cropland Data Layer for part of northern Illinois: corn (gold), soybeans (dark green), developed land (dark gray, including the Chicago-area counties of Cook, DuPage and Will), forest (medium green) and grassland (light green). Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Chicago area has been spreading into surrounding farmland. Credit: Eileen Hornbaker, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
About Landsat
Landsat is the most widely used land remote-sensing data source in federal civilian agencies, used by governments at every level and by businesses. Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 together image Earth's land every 8 days, continuing the world's longest record of the land surface, and the data are free through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, funded by the National Land Imaging Program.
Sources
Based on "Illinois and Landsat," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3006, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from pubs.usgs.gov
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