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On a single day in April 2011, 62 confirmed tornadoes tore across Alabama. From space, Landsat recorded their tracks as long streaks across the landscape — and a 2017 study used Landsat to follow how forests and croplands recovered over the next five years.
Tornado tracks near Tuscaloosa (left, in red) and Birmingham (upper right) from April 27, 2011, in the USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection product built from Landsat. Long purple streaks mark the changed landscape. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey.
The Cotton State today
Alabama's warm climate and rich soil support agriculture and timber — cotton is no longer king, but it remains part of a multibillion-dollar farm economy that also produces poultry, cattle and calves, corn, lumber, soybeans and catfish. The state has 21 state parks and 11 national parks, monuments and trails. Dauphin Island, home since 1961 to the Audubon Bird Sanctuary, is the first land that migrating birds and pollinators see on their return from South America, a landing zone for hundreds of species such as sandpipers, plovers and herons — and a shield for Alabama's coast.
Three ways Landsat helps
| Use | Example |
|---|---|
| Crops | Landsat is a key source for the USDA's Cropland Data Layer, which maps crops nationwide each year and tracks rotations. Researchers used it to map peach orchards in a study of the risk warming winters pose to peaches in Alabama and across the Southeast (Parker and Abatzoglou, 2019). |
| Severe weather and fire | Landsat feeds LANDFIRE, used by fire scientists to understand fuels and land cover, and the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity service, which maps every large U.S. fire since 1984. After tornadoes and Gulf Coast hurricanes, it supports wide-area damage surveys and studies of recovery (Kingfield and de Beurs, 2017). |
| Ecosystems | Landsat can track the health of loblolly pines — native trees that have become an important commodity — across whole landscapes through the growing season, helping foresters target their efforts (Blinn and others, 2019). It also informed a management plan for Dauphin Island prepared by the USGS and other federal partners (Steyer and others, 2020). |
The Cropland Data Layer for Montgomery and west: forest (medium green), grass and pasture (yellow-green), cotton (red), corn (gold), soybeans (dark green), wetlands (medium blue), water (dark blue) and developed land (gray). Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.
At 133 feet, Grace's High Falls is Alabama's tallest waterfall — a seasonal fall, best seen in winter and spring, that depends on rain. Credit: Matt Switzer, National Park Service.
About Landsat
Landsat is the most widely used land remote-sensing data source in federal civilian agencies, and local, state and Tribal governments and businesses rely on it too. A 2017 USGS study put its annual economic benefit to the United States at $2.06 billion, far more than it costs (Straub and others, 2019). Landsat 8 and 9 together cover Earth's land every 8 days, extending a 50-year record — the world's longest of the land surface — and NASA and the USGS are planning its successor, Landsat Next. The data are free, available worldwide through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, funded by the National Land Imaging Program.
Sources
Based on "Alabama and Landsat," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3060, a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Лицензия: CC0 1.0 (общественное достояние) · По материалам pubs.usgs.gov
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