Landsat Update for Living Atlas

Esri began providing free access to Landsat imagery through our online services back in 2013.  With 1.1 million individual scenes, and new scenes added daily, our Landsat archive has grown to cover the Earth many times over.  Our Multispectral Landsat layer provides both the historic GLS epoch imagery and the full Landsat 8 imagery archive.  Looking for just Landsat 8 or perhaps polar projected scenes?  We also offer additional layers including Landsat 8 Views, Landsat Arctic Views, and Landsat Antarctic Views.

In order to handle the ever expanding archive, and in response to user feedback, we recently made enhancements adding functionality and improving the overall user experience.

Thermal Bands

Our Landsat services still include eight multispectral bands from the Operational Land Imager (OLI).  However, we have now included two additional bands, TIRS1 and TIRS2, from the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), presented as Band 10 and Band 11 respectively.  Users can directly access these two bands in their “raw” form.  Alternatively, we have also included two new raster functions for on-the-fly conversion to surface temperature (offered in both °F and °C for each band).  For more on the conversion, check out Deriving temperature from Landsat 8 thermal bands (TIRS).

Collection-1

All of the older Pre-Collection Level-1 data has been updated to Collection 1 Level-1 data.  “Landsat Collection 1 ensures all Landsat Level-1 products provide a consistent archive of known data quality to support time series analyses and data “stacking”, while controlling continuous improvement of the archive, and access to all data as they are acquired.”

Performance and Stability

Both server and database have been upgraded for improved performance and stability.

NOTE:  While these upgrades are generally great news for our users, it is important to note that the ObjectID for each image in our archive has changed.  This means that any existing reference to images by ObjectID (e.g. “Lock Raster”), will need to be refreshed in order to reference the correct image.