Landsat in Oklahoma: Mapping Crops, Wildfires and Tornado Damage

Crops

More than 75 percent of Oklahoma's land is used for agriculture. Besides wheat and cotton, it grows corn, soybeans, sorghum, rye, hay, peanuts and pecans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Cropland Data Layer, built on Landsat and other data, shows every year what is planted, how much, and where — crop type, acreage and yield — and where land use has changed, helping farmers and the industry make sound decisions.

The 2021 Cropland Data Layer map of Oklahoma: forest (medium green), grass and pasture (light yellow-green), shrubland (light tan), wheat (dark brown), corn and sorghum (orange), soybeans (dark green), cotton (red), rye (purple); developed land gray, water dark blue. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Wildfires

A dry winter can turn one summer's lush grassland into tinder the next year. That led to the Anderson Creek Fire, which began in northern Oklahoma in spring 2016 and, driven by wind across the border, became Kansas's largest wildfire in modern history — until the Starbuck Fire, which started in Oklahoma the next spring and also spread into Kansas.

Landsat shows the land before and after a fire, and the fire's severity and extent. The Landsat-based Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity program has mapped large U.S. fires from 1984 to 2022 — nearly 29,000 of them — supporting fire and land management and research on recovery.

Landsat images before and after two fires in Oklahoma: the Anderson Creek Fire, which began in late March 2016 and spread north into Kansas, and the 350 Complex Fire, where four fires merged, just to its southwest. The orange patch at lower left is an older burn scar. U.S. Geological Survey

Tornadoes

Oklahomans know severe weather well: the first official U.S. tornado forecast and warning came in 1948 from Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory and Storm Prediction Center are in Norman. The state averages 57 tornadoes a year — but had 149 in 2019 — and Landsat shows where tornadoes did damage and how far it extends. University of Oklahoma and National Severe Storms Laboratory researchers used Landsat to study tornado damage in 17 urban, forest and grassland areas of the southeastern United States, 3 of them in Oklahoma, from 2002 to 2015, and how forests recovered.

A tornado south of Anadarko, Oklahoma, on May 3, 1999, part of an outbreak of 74 tornadoes across Oklahoma and Kansas that killed 46 people and injured 800, mostly around Oklahoma City. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Severe Storms Laboratory

Landsat for the nation

The USGS National Land Imaging Program supplies satellite imagery and geospatial data to government, business, universities and the public, with worldwide access to Landsat through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing source among federal civilian agencies, informing daily decisions on land, water and resources; a 2017 USGS study put its annual U.S. economic benefit at $2.06 billion. Landsat 8 and 9 cover Earth's land every 8 days, and NASA and USGS are shaping Landsat Next to extend the 50-year record — the world's longest of Earth's land surface. Its data are free.

Sources

Based on Oklahoma and Landsat, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3032, USGS Publications Warehouse, citing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (2022), Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (2022), Kingfield and De Beurs (2017) and Straub and others (2019); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source's "UDSA" is corrected to USDA.