The Landsat 9 mission, currently under development and proceeding towards a targeted launch in late 2020, will be very similar to the Landsat 8 mission, launched in 2013. Like Landsat 8, Landsat 9 is a joint effort between NASA and USGS with two sensors, the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2), essentially a copy of the OLI on Landsat 8 and the Thermal Infrared Sensor 2 (TIRS-2), very similar to ...

The Landsat 15-m Panchromatic-Assisted Downscaling (LPAD) method to downscale Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) 30-m data to Sentinel-2 multi-spectral instrument (MSI) 20-m resolution is presented. The method first downscales the Landsat-8 30-m OLI bands to 15-m using the spatial detail provided by the Landsat-8 15-m panchromatic band and then reprojects and resamples the downscaled 15-m ...

Near-nadir observations by the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) onboard the Sentinel-2 and the Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard Landsat 8 were collected during two Simultaneous Nadir Overpasses (SNO). Multispectral images with 10, 20, and 30 m resolution from a spatially uniform area in the Saharan desert were acquired for direct comparison of MSI and OLI TopOf-Atmosphere (TOA) reflectances....

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...

This study evaluates the radiometric consistency between Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) using cross calibration techniques. Two approaches are used, one based on cross calibration between the two sensors using simultaneous image pairs, acquired during an underfly event on 29–30 March 2013. The other approach is based on using time seri...

We investigated a method for noise removal on Landsat-8 OLI timeseries using CBERS-4 MUX data to improve crop classification. An algorithm was built to look to the nearest MUX image for each Landsat image, based on user defined time span. The algorithm checks for cloud contaminated pixels on the Landsat time series using Fmask and replaces them with CBERS-4 MUX to build the integrated time seri...

Thin cirrus clouds frequently contaminate images acquired with either Landsat 7 ETM+ or the earlier generation of Landsat series satellite instruments. The situation has changed since the launch of the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) into space in 2013. OLI implemented a cirrus detecting channel (Band 9) centered within a strong atmospheric water vapor absorption band near 1.375 μm with...

Water bodies are essential to humans and other forms of life. Identification of water bodies can be useful in various ways, including estimation of water availability, demarcation of flooded regions, change detection, and so on. In past decades, Landsat satellite sensors have been used for land use classification and water body identification. Due to the introduction of a New Operational Land I...

Wetland inundation is crucial to the survival and prosperity of fauna and flora communities in wetland ecosystems. Even small changes in surface inundation may result in a substantial impact on the wetland ecosystem characteristics and function. This study presented a novel method for wetland inundation mapping at a subpixel scale in a typical wetland region on the Zoige Plateau, northeast Tibe...

Moderate spatial resolution satellite data from the Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2A MSI sensors together offer 10 m to 30 m multi-spectral reflective wavelength global coverage, providing the opportunity for improved combined sensor mapping and monitoring of the Earth’s surface. However, the standard geolocated Landsat-8 OLI L1T and Sentinel-2A MSI L1C data products are currently found to be misa...