U.S. Geological Survey, Fact Sheet 2020–3034, August 2020.
Figure 3: Landsat satellites have imaged Earth's land without a break since 1972. USGS.
Why it exists
Changes across Earth's land affect people, economies and the environment every day. Tracking them — locally, regionally and globally — takes continuous watching of continents, islands and coasts.
The USGS National Land Imaging (NLI) Program keeps moderate-resolution satellite imagery and other remote-sensing and geospatial data coming. A core job: worldwide access to everything collected since 1972 by Landsat, the USGS's flagship satellite series. It also advances land remote sensing at home and abroad, working with NASA, other agencies, industry, foreign space programs and international consortia.
Figure 1: Landsat 8 views of farmland near Indianapolis: A, before planting; B, during the growing season. USGS.
Five activities
1. Starting from what users need
What users need decides what data the program collects and buys. It gathers and analyzes those needs by measurement — what must be observed, not which satellite does it — to guide new systems, data purchases and partnerships with non-USGS missions.
2. Keeping the images coming
For almost 50 years, Landsat has been used to watch crop health, water use, urban growth, wildfires, forests and industrialization, and to help reduce hunger worldwide.
Figure 2: crop water use in California's San Joaquin Valley, May–September, 1990 and 2014. Colors show millimeters of water returned to the air by evapotranspiration — evaporation plus plants' transpiration. Green and blue: heavily irrigated fields; orange: little, as in sparse desert. USGS.
Who does what (since 2000):
| NASA | USGS, through its EROS Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota |
|---|---|
| builds and launches the satellites | runs flight operations; oversees building and testing of flight and ground systems; coordinates the ground station network; acquires, produces, calibrates, validates and distributes the data |
After Landsat 8 launched in 2013 — and with Landsat the most-used land remote-sensing source in federal civil agencies — the government funded a system to deliver Landsat-quality imagery for the next 25 years: Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI), shared with NASA.
- Landsat 9: scheduled to launch in 2021.
- Landsat Next: a follow-on with new capabilities for a wider range of Earth monitoring, likely with commercial and international partners.
Beyond SLI, the program:
- supports the interagency Civil Applications Committee and runs the USGS National Civil Applications Center, giving civil agencies access to U.S. National Systems data and unclassified products from classified sources;
- co-leads the Federal Geographic Data Committee's imagery theme, for high-resolution airborne data;
- arranges access to international and commercial satellite data;
- funds the USGS National Unmanned Aircraft Systems Project Office, for drones in research and monitoring.
3. Keeping the record, and keeping it open
The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 (Public Law 102–555, recodified in 2010 as Public Law 111–314) called for continuous monitoring and an archive of the nation's land. The program fills it: satellite imagery, millions of aerial photographs, radar and lidar — at EROS, the world's largest public-domain archive of land images.
- Free since 2008: Landsat data cost nothing, worldwide.
- Millions of ready-processed Landsat scenes are downloaded from EROS every month, and more through commercial cloud providers.
- Uses: land cover and land use, water and ecosystem health, farm productivity, energy and minerals, disaster risk and response, environment and human health, and climate variability.
Figure 4: the Cougar Creek fire near Mount Adams, 75 miles northeast of Portland, Oregon. A, August 7, 2014; B, September 11, 2015, burned land in red; C, burn severity: dark green unburned, light blue low, yellow moderate, red high. USGS.
4. New technology and products
The program sponsors research on new satellites and sensors, government and commercial data, ways to collect data and new uses. A key product: Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP), which characterizes land change at any U.S. location across the whole Landsat record — when, where and why — with projections for decision-makers, and is expected to feed the National Water Model and USGS predictive modeling.
5. Policy, at home and abroad
- supports National Space Policy and the National Plan for Civil Earth Observations;
- co-chairs the U.S. Group on Earth Observations, with NASA, NOAA, USDA and others;
- works with the international Group on Earth Observations and Committee on Earth Observation Satellites;
- helps run the international Landsat ground station network, and brings historical Landsat data held abroad back to the USGS;
- supports the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters, for fast access to foreign and commercial imagery after disasters.
Figure 5: ground stations of the U.S. and international partners that receive Landsat data directly; circles show each one's reception range. USGS.
Sources
Based on National Land Imaging Program, USGS Fact Sheet 2020–3034, U.S. Geological Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The five figures are taken from the fact sheet's PDF, which the import had left out.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from pubs.usgs.gov
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