The next Landsat satellite: The Landsat Data Continuity Mission

Abstract

Geological Survey (USGS) are developing the successor mission to Landsat 7 that is currently known as the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), NASA is responsible for buHding and launching the LDCM satellite observatory, USGS is building the ground system and wi!1 assume responsibility for sate!Hte operations and for collecting. archiving, and distributing data following launch. The observatory wi!! consist of a spacecraft in low-Earth orbit with a two-sensor payload. One sensor, the Operational land Imager (OU), wi!! collect image data for nine shortwave spectra! bands over a ! 85 km swath with a 30 m spatia] resolution for all bands except a 15 m panchromatic band. The other instrument, the Thermal !nfrared Sensor (TIRS), wi!! collect image data for two thermal bands with a 100 m resolution over a 185 km swath. Both sensors offer technical advancements over earlier Landsat instruments. OU and TIRS will coincidently collect data and the observatory will transmit the data to the ground system where it will be archived, processed to Level I data products containing well calibrated and co-registered OU and TIRS data, and made available for free distribution to the general public. The LDCM development is on schedule for a December 2012 launch, The USGS intends to rename the satellite "Umdsat 8" following launch, By either name a successful mission will fulfill a mandate for Landsat data continuity, The mission wi!! extend the almost 40-year landsat data archive with images sufficiently consistent with data from the earlier missions to allow long-term studies of regional and global land cover change,

Building an Earth Observations Data Cube: lessons learned from the Swiss Data Cube (SDC) on generating Analysis Ready Data (ARD)

“…Finally, when storing data, it is important to consider whether or not to keep the panchromatic band. Generally, this band is only used to pan-sharpen composite images (Irons, Dwyer, & Barsi, 2012). Depending on the envisioned usage, one can decide to ingest this band or not.…”

Mapping phytoplankton blooms in deep subalpine lakes from Sentinel-2A and Landsat-8

“…It is operating with a spatial resolution of 30 m at ground, acquiring images every 16 days (Irons et al, 2012;Roy et al, 2014), that might be reduced to 8-9 days in case target areas lie in two adjacent orbits . L8 aims to provide data continuity to the global NASA Landsat Earth observation program that started in the 1970s.…”

A Strategy of Rapid Extraction of Built-Up Area Using Multi-Seasonal Landsat-8 Thermal Infrared Band 10 Images

“…Landsat 8 Level 1 products in terrain-corrected ortho-rectified formats (L1T) were geometrically corrected using a digital elevation model to eliminate the visual error caused by regional topography [34]. Therefore, after image clipping, the primary false composite color image data were converted to top of atmosphere (ToA) radiance using a radiometric calibration module, and images were atmospherically corrected using the FLAASH atmospheric correction module for radiance to reflectance conversion.…”