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Full catalog/landsat-c2l2-sr-lakes-aral-sea
landsat-c2l2-sr-lakes-aral-sea·dataset

Satellite Views of the Shrinking Aral Sea

Selected Landsat 7 through 9 Surface Reflectance Scenes for the Aral Sea
hydrosphere NASA VEDA COG
In plain English

What it measures. Clear satellite images of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, chosen for low cloud cover.

How it's made. From Landsat 7, 8, and 9 satellite imagery, combined across missions for natural-color views.

How & where you'd use it. Lets scientists track the dramatic loss of water in one of the world's most famous shrinking lakes.

What's measured

landsatc2l2lakesaralsea

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span1986-04-10 → 2023-06-20
  • Spatial extent56.998, 43.535, 63.59, 47.089
  • FormatsCOG

What you can do with it

  • Follow rainfall, floods and surface-water extent
  • Track soil moisture and the onset of drought
  • Monitor lakes, rivers and groundwater storage
Official description

Selected low-cloud-cover Landsat Collection-2 Level-2 Surface Reflectance scenes covering the Aral Sea. Products from multiple missions and instruments are combined in this single collection for the purpose of visualizing RGB images. Note that the full item records are not interchangeable across instruments for purposes other than visualization and that the assets available are not the same for each instrument.

Get the data

veda_access.py
# NASA VEDA — open STAC API, anonymous (cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://openveda.cloud/api/stac")
col = cat.get_collection("landsat-c2l2-sr-lakes-aral-sea")
items = list(col.get_items())          # browse the analysis-ready COGs
# open an asset with rioxarray:
# import rioxarray; da = rioxarray.open_rasterio(items[0].assets["cog_default"].href)
NASA VEDA is an open STAC catalog — browse and stream the cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs anonymously (no login).