Landsat with Sentinel - Global Coverage

  • Released Tuesday, March 3, 2020
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This visualization depicts the orbits and data swaths of the Landsat 8, Landsat 9, Sentinel 2a, and Sentinel 2b satellites. The satellites appear one at a time with their respective data swaths. As time progresses throughout the visualization, the satellites ‘paint’ the globe with imagery to show how the four spacecraft work together to build a complete picture of the Earth.

Satellite data offers a broad, global view of land surface changes, but cloud cover interferes with collecting data. Landsat satellites provide observations every 16 days, and having two satellites reduces that to every 8 days. The European Space Agency Sentinel-2 satellites collect data in similar wavelengths and at a similar spatial resolution, enabling the data to be combined for even more observations. When harmonized into one data set, the result is global observations every two or three days at 30-meter resolution.

Any application looking at very dynamic phenomena, where changes occur on the timescales of a few days or weeks, will benefit from the harmonized Landsat/Sentinel dataset. For example, crop condition and area, burned area, or surface water extent. Also, this will benefit any application where short-term environmental conditions (like drought) have a rapid impact on ecosystems.

This visualization depicts the orbits and data swaths of the Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites. The satellites appear (beginning first with Landsat 8) with their respective data swaths. As time progresses throughout the visualization, the satellites ‘paint’ the globe with imagery to show how the two spacecraft work together to build a complete picture of the Earth.

This visualization depicts the orbits and data swaths of the Landsat 8, Landsat 9, Sentinel 2a, and Sentinel 2b satellites. The satellites appear (beginning first with Landsat 8) with their respective data swaths. As time progresses throughout the visualization, the satellites ‘paint’ the globe with imagery to show how the four spacecraft work together to build a complete picture of the Earth.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

This page was originally published on Tuesday, March 3, 2020.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 at 12:13 AM EST.

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