U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey Mid Decadal Global Land Survey Project briefing to the ScanEx RDC 3 rd International Conference, Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions presented by Steven Covington The Aerospace Corporation Landsat 7 Flight Systems Manager / Project International Coordinator / MDGLS Phase I Lead December 4-6, 2007

2 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 The Landsat Satellite Family Landsat 1-3  First Civil Land Remote Sensing Missions  Flown from 1972 – 1982  Primary Sensors: Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) Return Beam Vidicon (RBV) Landsat 4 and 5  Landsat 4 flown 1982 – 2002  Landsat 5 from 1984 – Present  Primary Sensors Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) Thematic Mapper (TM) Landsat 7  Flown from 1999 – Present  Primary Sensor: Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+)

3 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Mid-Decadal Global Land Survey The USGS and NASA have worked together in the past to create three global surveys of the Earth’s landmass from orthographically- corrected satellite imagery centered on specific timeframes  Global Land Survey (GLS)1975, GLS1990 and GLS2000 The objective of MDGLS is to extend this series with a new global land survey centered on a epoch The Project has 2 Dataset Production Phases:  Phase 1: satellite tasking, ground station coordination, scene selection, data transfer, and ingest into the USGS archive Landsat 5 & 7 TM and ETM+ data will be the primary sources of data  Compatible ETM+ scenes will be used to makeup a composite pair Other sensors: EO-1, ASTER, …  Phase 2: Process the collected data into an ortho-rectified dataset of virtually cloud-free scenes compatible with previous surveys

4 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Mid-Decadal Global Land Survey Past Survey Coverage Statistics  1970’s: 6,976 path/rows  1990: 7,037 path/rows  2000: 8,209 path/rows MDGLS will increase total coverage to approximately 9,500 scenes  Inclusion of the Antarctic continent  Better accounting of islands and reefs  Full coverage of Arctic area in ‘ascending’ orbit The MDGLS Scene Baseline includes 13,106 unique path/rows  This number includes Antarctica, but doesn’t exclude the geographic coverage overlap at high latitudes  Antarctica accounts for 3589 Path/Rows (~1200 unique coverage)  The final MDGLS unique scene count should be in the range of 9300 path/rows

5 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Scene Selection Criteria Mid-decadal acquisition period of  ( : Prime) Cloud Cover ≤ 10% ETM+ SLC-Off Composite Pair filler targeted at ≤ 5%  Landsat 7 Gap Closure of > 95% Assumes the allowance of a 2-pixel interpolation Coverage Seasonality Green Season: a date criteria was developed that matched the period when the NDVI was within 40% of its maximum value and dynamic range Efforts are made to match acquisition dates with previous surveys to aid in land cover change analysis

6 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 MDGLS Baseline Coverage Green = GeoCover 2000 Coverage Red = New MDGLS Coverage

7 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Landsat 5 International Cooperator Ground Station Coverage

8 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 MDGLS Campaign Station Locations The Malindi and Yucatan stations came into service too late for inclusion in the GLS2005 dataset Magadan

9 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Landsat 5 Global Archive Accessibility Tested Capability Untested, but Compatible

10 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Landsat 5 Coverage in US Archive Each of these areas meet initial coverage requirements based on metadata

11 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Archived L7 ETM+ Coverage Meeting Specification* Green = 2005/2006 Coverage Yellow Yellow = 2004/2007 Coverage * Meets metadata standards, but may not be suitable for inclusion in the survey dataset

12 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Before Production Begins… The USGS and NASA have funded the reprocessing of the Tri- Decadal datasets (GeoCover) to improve the geometric accuracy  Terrain correction is being updated with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data  Production process is being improved Reducing the number of error-producing tie-points between individual blocks  The products are now resampled to 15/30/60(120) meters This reprocessing is now underway  The 2000, 1990 and 1975 surveys will each be reprocessed  The reprocessed data will be made available at no charge as it becomes available This new and improved dataset will be used as control for all future Landsat product ground control - including the GLS2005

13 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Production Sequence LGGS Delivery/MDGLS Processing: Landsat archive OrderIC StationsCampaign Stations 1 North AmericaCanadaChetumal 2 CaribbeanChetumal 3 Africa, MadagascarSouth AfricaMaspalomas 4 EurasiaChinaJapan*ThailandKiruna, Moscow, Irkutsk, Magadan 5 Australia 6 New ZealandAustralia 7 South AmericaArgentinaBrazilChetumal 8 Indonesia Thailand 9 GreenlandKiruna 10 JapanJapan*China 11 IcelandKiruna 12 Islands No issues Likely to proceed; issues in work Unlikely at present; issues in work *Ingest capability unknown ETM+ product will begin production in early 2008 TM products will begin production in mid-2008 All production completed by end of 2008

14 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Global Land Survey Distribution Policy Individual products will all be made available online at no charge  Products will become available soon after production Contributors to the Mid Decadal GLS2005 dataset will receive a complete copy once production is complete All GLS data is available through the USGS for download at no charge  Go to  For the Scene Collection, Choose ‘Landsat Decadal’

15 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Landsat Data Distribution Policy Update Select ETM+ data are being distributed at no charge as part of a Landsat Data Continuity Mission pilot project What’s Included:  New ETM+ acquisitions with less than 20% cloud cover and quality scores of ’99’ from the US and Territories  More geographic area will be added over the next 6 months, eventually leading to global coverage Expanding Options  It is planned that by the end of Calendar 2008, all newly acquired SLC-off scenes will be made available for no charge using the standard product specification Additional datasets will eventually be added, including  Landsat 7 ETM+ SLC-on  Landsat 4/5 TM  Landsat 1-5 MSS

16 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Standard Product Specification  Pixel size:15m/30m/60m (14.25/28.5/57m)  Media type:Download (no cost), CD/DVD ($50)  Product type:L1T (terrain-corrected)  Output format:GeoTIFF  Map projection:UTM  Orientation:North up  Resampling:Cubic convolution  Publically available terrain data used to produce Global Land Survey products will be made available at no charge

17 ScanEx RDC, 3 rd International Conference Earth from Space: The Most Effective Solutions December 4-6, 2007 Other Developments The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) is scheduled for launch in mid-2011  It is currently planned that data products following the ‘standard specifications’ are made available at no charge The U.S. Government is standing up a new organization; the National Land Imaging Program (NLIP)  This Program will be responsible for collection of civil land remote sensing data for the US archive  The Department of the Interior will manage the program  A main goal of NLIP will be to ‘operationalize’ collection of Landsat-class observations

U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey Thank You