Eyes on Earth

Today, the world is awash in remotely sensed data. Satellites launched by countries and commercial companies circle the planet collecting data every day. Accessing data from multiple agencies and plaforms and turning it into useful analytics can be a daunting and complex endeavor, however. On today's episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from the founder of the non-profit Radient Earth Foundation, which works to connect the global development community with the remote sensing data and machine leraning tools it needs to tackle social, economic and environmental issues. One major initiative involves opening access to satellite-based training data, such as crop classifications, land cover and the like, and connecting users to cloud computing resources that help users search for trends and changes across space and time. 

Mapping land cover across the United States using Landsat satellite data is a difficult, time-intensive job, but there are jobs far larger. Matt Hansen, a Maryland-based professor and member of the Landsat Science Team focuses his efforts on mapping land cover and change on a global scale. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from Matt on how he and his team use the Landsat archive to map change at such a wide scale.

Calibration teams at the USGS EROS Center use a variety of methods to make sure the data collected by Landsat satellites are an accurate representation of the Earth’s surface. They’re constantly comparing new imagery to old, tweaking algorithms to correct issues that might emerge, and using unchanging Earth surface sites and on-the-ground readings to check for consistency. Since the launch of Landsat 8, they’ve come to rely on another unchanging landscape to check for quality: the lunar surface. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear how it’s done.

Just recently, in mid-July, the flight operations team charged with keeping the Landsat 7 satellite running smoothly achieved a major milestone. They have gone 8 straight years now without an operator error. Considering that the team is operating a machine that costs hundreds of millions of dollars and flies at more than 17,000 miles per hour, avoiding any kind or operator error for 8 years is a reason to celebrate. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from the supervisor of the team behind the incredible flight operations run.

In the days before LANDFIRE, fire scientists often struggled to find the vegetation and fuels data they needed to map the path of fires, keep firefighters safe, and to model fire recovery. The dizzying array of data points found in the map layers of the LANDFIRE product suite—from hundreds of vegetation classes to tree canopy height and bulk to fuel potential and beyond—became indispensable upon its release in 2005. Since then, it’s also proven its worth to land managers, ecologists, biologists, carbon modelers and others, and has been cited in over 1,000 papers. LANDFIRE is a multi-agency partnership led by the DOI Office of Wildland Fire and the USDA Forest Service. On this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from a non-profit LANDFIRE partner about the program’s value, and about recent efforts to remap the United States to improve the product.