Agricultural Cycles in the Imperial Valley
This page features HLS (Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2) time series of California’s Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea. Spanning October 2024 to October 2025, these animations highlight multiple agricultural growth cycles within a single year using natural color, NDVI, and a side-by-side comparison.
Scientists use NDVI to assess vegetation presence, density, and stress levels by combining near-infrared (NIR) and red reflectance measurements from optical satellites. Darker green indicates healthier and denser vegetation, while lighter green indicates unhealthy or absent vegetation.
A natural-color HLS time series of the Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea, spanning October 2024 to October 2025, showing dramatic seasonal changes driven by agricultural growth cycles.
A NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) HLS time series of the Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea, spanning October 2024 to October 2025, showing dramatic seasonal changes driven by agricultural growth cycles.
A side-by-side comparison of HLS time series in the Imperial Valley near the Salton Sea, with natural color on the left and NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) on the right. The animations, which span from October 2024 to October 2025, contrast visible landscape changes with measures of vegetation health across agricultural growth cycles.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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Visualizer
- Ross K. Walter (SSAI)
Missions
This page is related to the following missions:Datasets used
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[Landsat]
ID: 47
Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Release date
This page was originally published on Wednesday, May 6, 2026.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 3:20 PM EDT.