The launch of Landsat 7 on April 15, 1999 ushered in a new era of managing global survey missions. For the first time (for Landsat or any similar mission) an automated Long-Term Acquisition Plan (LTAP) was employed to populate the US Archive at the USGS EROS Data Center. The automated LTAP system was designed to globally collect sunlit, essentially cloud-free, and seasonally refreshed Landsat a...

The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat-8 represents a generational change from heritage Landsat instruments in its design, while it maintains data continuity with the 40+ year Landsat data archive. It preserves the 30-m ground sample distance, 185-km swath width and VIS/NIR/SWIR spectral bands. Furthermore, data continuity resulted from extensive pre-launch and on-orbit calibration and ch...

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an essential land surface parameter for Earth surface process simulations and global change studies. The currently existing FVC products are mostly obtained from low or medium resolution remotely sensed data, while many applications require the fine spatial resolution FVC product. The availability of well-calibrated coverage of Landsat imagery over large are...

In this paper, we perform multi-sensor multi-resolution data fusion of Landsat-5 TM bands (at 30 m spatial resolution) and multispectral bands of World View-2 (WV-2 at 2 m spatial resolution) through linear spectral unmixing model. The advantages of fusing Landsat and WV-2 data are two fold: first, spatial resolution of the Landsat bands increases to WV-2 resolution. Second, integration of data...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Landsat program has been dedicated to sustaining data continuity over the 20-year period during which Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced TM Plus (ETM+) sensors have been acquiring images of the earth's surface. In 2000, NASA launched the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Advanced Land Imager (ALI) to test new technology that could improve t...

The potential of Landsat data processing to provide systematic continental scale products has been demonstrated by several projects including the NASA Webenabled Landsat Data (WELD) project. The recent free availability of Landsat data increases the need for robust and efficient atmospheric correction algorithms. This study compares the accuracy of two Landsat atmospheric correction methods: a ...

The satellite-derived growing season time-integrated Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GSN) has been used as a proxy for vegetation biomass productivity. The 250-m GSN data estimated from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors have been used for terrestrial ecosystem modeling and monitoring. High temporal resolution with a wide range of wavelengths make the MODI...

Despite its very large territory and the best Landsat archive in the world, Canada has made very limited use of Landsat data for land cover mapping. The primary difficulty has been the prohibitive cost of information extraction and the earlier (and now overcome for Landsat-7 enhanced thematic mapper plus data) high cost of data purchase. The solution to this remaining obstacle lies in decreasin...

The 30 meter spatial resolution of Landsat sensors makes it one of the most suitable datasets for bridging the gap between local measurements and large-scale studies of biophysical processes, yet its usage is limited by the availability of cloud-free surface observations. Methods have been proposed to combine Landsat data with measurements from sensors of coarse spatial resolution but high temp...

Historical efforts to gather and utilize Landsat Thematic Mapper radiometric information from Earth images and the sensor internal calibration systems were typically manual in nature and hence limited in terms of data sampling and subsequent analysis. Multiple government agencies and private corporations operated the Landsat TM missions over their respective lifetimes resulting in a sparse spor...