Google Cloud access to Landsat archive

Saturday, September 22, 2012

This is a nice catch on accessing the Landsat archive. As with all things Landsat, its organised by path/row of individual scenes. Use the NASA convertor to work out which path/row you are interested in. You’ll then see a list of scenes with numbers such as this: LE70592202007107EDC00. The file contains ALL the bands in the image but encoded in name is the sensor (LE7 or Lndsat 7), path/row (059/220), scene date (2007107; think there must be a digit missing here or its an abbreviation) and source (EDC or Eros Data Centre).

Once you’ve got the file use 7zip or similar to decompress/unarchive. This will give you a series of files (band designations here) such as:

L71059220_22020070417_B10.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B20.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B30.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B40.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B50.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B61.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_MTL.TXT
L71059220_22020070417_B62.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B70.TIF
L71059220_22020070417_B80.TIF

These are bands 1-5, the two thermal bands (low gain and high gain) and band 7. Band 8 is the higher resolution (15m) panchromatic (read: B&W) band. If you are using these in a remote sensing package such as image you’ll need to layer stack them.

Go grab as its quick and easy once you know what you’re looking for.