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Landsat 8 & 9 (USGS/NASA)

Provider
USGS / NASA
Website
earthexplorer.usgs.gov | GEE
Access Level
🟡 Free Registration (USGS) | 🔵 GEE
Resolution
30m (multispectral), 15m (panchromatic)
Archive
1972 (Landsat-1) to present — 50+ year record
Revisit Time
16 days (each satellite)

Why Landsat Is Unique

Landsat's superpower is its long archive. No other free satellite has data going back to 1972. This makes it perfect for:

  • Tracking urban growth from 1980 to 2024
  • Measuring lake and reservoir shrinkage over decades
  • Detecting deforestation going back 30+ years
  • Analysing agricultural change across policy periods

Landsat Bands (Landsat 8/9 OLI)

Band Name Wavelength Key Use
B1 Coastal/Aerosol 443nm Water, haze
B2 Blue 482nm True colour
B3 Green 562nm True colour
B4 Red 655nm True colour, NDVI
B5 Near Infrared (NIR) 865nm NDVI, vegetation
B6 SWIR-1 1610nm Soil moisture, burn
B7 SWIR-2 2200nm Geology
B8 Panchromatic 591nm 15m resolution sharpening
B10 Thermal Infrared (TIRS) 10.9μm Land Surface Temperature
B11 Thermal Infrared (TIRS) 12.0μm Land Surface Temperature

Access Methods

Method 1: USGS EarthExplorer (Direct Download) 🟡

  1. Register at earthexplorer.usgs.gov
  2. Draw your area of interest on the map
  3. Select dates and cloud cover threshold
  4. Under "Data Sets" → Select "Landsat Collection 2 Level 2" (atmospherically corrected)
  5. View results → Click Download → Choose GeoTIFF

Each Landsat scene is ~900 MB for all bands. Download only your area with spatial subsetting.

// GEE JS Code
// https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/LANDSAT_LC09_C02_T1_L2

var dataset = ee.ImageCollection('LANDSAT/LC09/C02/T1_L2')
    .filterDate('2022-01-01', '2022-02-01');

// Applies scaling factors.
function applyScaleFactors(image) {
  var opticalBands = image.select('SR_B.').multiply(0.0000275).add(-0.2);
  var thermalBands = image.select('ST_B.*').multiply(0.00341802).add(149.0);
  return image.addBands(opticalBands, null, true)
              .addBands(thermalBands, null, true);
}

dataset = dataset.map(applyScaleFactors);

var visualization = {
  bands: ['SR_B4', 'SR_B3', 'SR_B2
  min: 0.0,
  max: 0.3,
};

Map.setCenter(-114.2579, 38.9275, 8);

Map.addLayer(dataset, visualization, 'True Color (432)');

✏️ Practice Exercise

Coming soon...

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