Atmospherically-corrected global Landsat surface imagery (USGS)
What it measures. It shows what the Earth's land surface actually looks like from space, with the haze and distortion from the atmosphere stripped away so colors are true. It also captures how warm the surface is.
How it's made. Built from decades of pictures taken by NASA/USGS Landsat satellites 4 through 9, using their Thematic Mapper, Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus, Operational Land Imager, and Thermal Infrared sensors, processed to a corrected Level-2 product.
How & where you'd use it. Because it spans many satellites over a long stretch of time, it is ideal for tracking how land changes year to year, such as forests, farmland, cities, and water, and for spotting where the surface is heating up or cooling down.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span1982-08-22 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsCOG
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
Atmospherically corrected global Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 data from the Thematic Mapper (TM) onboard Landsat 4 and 5, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) onboard Landsat 7, and the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) onboard Landsat 8 and 9.
Get the data
# AWS Earth Search — anonymous, no login (cloud-optimized on S3)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://earth-search.aws.element84.com/v1")
items = cat.search(
collections=["landsat-c2-l2"],
bbox=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
).item_collection() # open assets with rioxarray / stackstac On AWS Earth Search — anonymous public S3, no login at all.
Official links
- Open data source AWS Earth Search