ANALYSIS READY SATELLITE DATA ACCESS

The Landsat satellite missions have systematically provided multispectral imagery over Earth’s surface for over 40 years, amassing a temporally dense archive of data that could be used in any number of scientific studies involving the monitoring, assessment, and projection of land change. U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, while continuing to operate Landsat data collection, archive, and distribution, has initiated development of an advanced capacity that will efficiently deliver user-specified information derivatives that transform the availability of lower-level data into analysis ready products for use in mapping and modeling applications. Using advanced processing frameworks and applications programming interfaces (API), Landsat scenes are deconstructed and stored as pixels in a datacube from which seamless, calibrated, georeferenced, spatially projected, and quality-masked areas of interest, co-registered temporal layer stacks, temporal or band composites, and vectors of pixel values for specific point locations drilled down through data layers can be easily extracted. The need to perform time, network, and disk consuming pre-analysis data manipulations is ameliorated by the abstraction of traditional World Reference System-2 (WRS-2) scenes into parcels of information that can be filtered for quality conditions and readily packaged to user specifications for format, map projection, band selection, geographic extent, and time period. This exciting new information access methodology is currently evolving through a prototypical phase and is expected to achieve an initial operating capability over the continental U.S. by November 2017.