Landsat

Purpose

This page will outline Landsat as a long-running optical imagery archive for historical land surface monitoring and trend analysis.

Outline

• What the Landsat program provides across decades of consistent observation.
• Strengths for long-term change detection, land cover history, and regional baselines.
• Limitations around revisit cadence, spatial resolution, clouds, and sensor-era differences.
• How collection versions, surface reflectance products, and quality bands shape workflows.
• Workflow relevance for deforestation, urban expansion, water change, fire recovery, and agriculture.
• Engineering implications for harmonizing sensors, filtering time ranges, and building composites.
• Access patterns through Earth Engine collections, USGS-hosted products, and cloud data catalogs.

Later Examples

• Multi-decade land cover trend outline.
• Annual median composite workflow sketch.
• Combining Landsat and Sentinel-2 for denser time series.