Stitched monthly Landsat land imagery (30 m)
What it measures. Monthly, cloud-free composite images of land at 30 m detail, including surface reflectance, vegetation greenness (NDVI), and how warm surfaces look from above.
How it's made. Assembled from all available Landsat 5 and 7 images for each month, corrected for atmosphere and viewing angle and stitched onto a consistent global grid.
How & where you'd use it. Mapping land cover and tracking how landscapes change over time across regions, with ready-to-use clean monthly snapshots.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2008-12-01 → 2011-11-30
- Measured byLANDSAT-7 (ETM+) · LANDSAT-5 (TM)
- Processing levelLevel 2
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsHDF4
- StatusCOMPLETE
What you can do with it
- Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
- Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
- Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description
The NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments ([MEaSUREs](https://earthdata.nasa.gov/about/competitive-programs/measures)) Global Web-Enabled Landsat Data Monthly (GWELDMO) Version 3 data product provides Landsat data at 30 meter (m) resolution for terrestrial non-Antarctica locations over monthly reporting periods for the 2010 epoch. GWELD data products are generated from all available Landsat 4 and 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat archive. The GWELD suite of products provide consistent data to derive land cover as well as geophysical and biophysical information for regional assessment of land surface dynamics. The GWELD products include Nadir Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF)-Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR) for the reflective wavelength bands and top of atmosphere (TOA) brightness temperature for the thermal bands. The products are defined in the Sinusoidal coordinate system to promote continuity of NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land tile grid. Provided in the GWELDMO product are layers for surface reflectance bands 1 through 5 and 7, TOA brightness temperature for thermal bands, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), day of year, ancillary angle, and data quality information. A low-resolution red, green, blue (RGB) browse image of bands 5, 4, 3 is also available for each granule. Known Issues * GWELDMO known issues can be found in Section 4 of the Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD). Please note that the version 3.0 GWELD products for 2009, 2010 and 2011 are defined in HDF4 which cannot be read correctly by GDAL/ArcGIS. This is not an issue for the version 3.1 GWELD products
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="GWELDMO",
version="003",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from LPCLOUD Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Earthdata Search allows users to search, discover, visualize, refine, and access NASA Earth Observation data. GET DATA
- The technical information in the User's Guide enables users to interpret and use the data products. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- The ATBD provides physical theory and mathematical procedures for the calculations used to produce the data products. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- GWELD Project Website VIEW RELATED INFORMATION