ResourceSat-2A — India's land & crop mapping satellite
What it measures. Multispectral pictures of land, crops, water and forests across India, in visible and infrared light, at moderate detail (24-56 m) with a wide swath for frequent national coverage.
How it's made. Built and operated by ISRO; the LISS-III and AWiFS cameras image India repeatedly for the country's operational land and agriculture programmes.
How & where you'd use it. The backbone of India's crop-acreage forecasting (FASAL/NCFC), land-use mapping and water-body monitoring. Download via ISRO's Bhoonidhi portal (free account needed).
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2016-12-07 → ongoing
- Spatial extent68, 6, 98, 37
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
ISRO's operational land-observation satellite — multispectral imagery (LISS-III 24 m, AWiFS 56 m wide-swath) used across India for agriculture, land cover, water and disaster mapping. Distributed via ISRO's Bhoonidhi/NRSC portal (free registration required).
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="resourcesat-2a",
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 ISRO NRSC BhoonidhiBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Open data source NRSC Bhoonidhi