Find Your Location

Landsat images are organized according to the Worldwide Reference System. There is a Landsat scene that covers every given location on Earth's landmasses between ~82° N and S. Landsat scenes cover a region of approximately 182 km x 185 km (113 x 115 miles). Each Landsat scene is identified by a Path and Row number.

To find out which Landsat scene(s) cover a given location you can either visually look for a location on the USGS Global Visualization (Glovis) Viewer's reference map or you can enter the geographic coordinates for a certain place into the "Lat/Long" boxes within the Glovis window. Using geographic coordinates is a more accurate method of finding a specific location.

If you do not know the geographic coordinates for your location, you can look in the gazetteer of almost any atlas. If your town or feature does not appear in your atlas, look for the coordinates of a large city in close proximity to your site and use its coordinates. The U.S. Census Bureau offers an online U.S. Gazetteer for locations within the United States. When you enter geographic coordinates into Glovis, remember locations in the southern hemisphere need to have a minus sign in front of their latitude and locations in the western hemisphere need a minus sign in front of their longitude.