Visualize Data

NASA Earthdata provides a number of ways for viewing imagery and creating visualizations of data, whether you are interested in natural disasters, land surfaces, water resources, or our oceans. Many of these tools provide access to near real-time imagery from some of NASA’s Earth observation missions, allowing for near-real time response to natural and man-made events.

Worldview
Interactively browse and download full-resolution, global satellite imagery from over 900 data products from NASA’s Land, Atmosphere Near real-time Capability for EOS (LANCE) and other NASA data providers. Showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now"—or at least as it has looked within the past few hours—Worldview supports time-critical application areas such as wildfire management, air quality measurements, and weather forecasting. Geostationary imagery layers are also now available. These are provided in ten minute increments for the last 30 days. These full disk hemispheric views allow for almost real-time viewing of changes occurring around most of the world. Worldview is supported by NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS).

Worldview Snapshots
Worldview Snapshots is a lightweight tool for creating image snapshots from a selection of popular NASA satellite imagery layers. Users can preview and download imagery in different band combinations and add overlays on the imagery of active fire detections, coastlines, borders, and roads. Worldview Snapshots is ideal for users with low/limited bandwidth access or for users who want to rapidly retrieve georeferenced satellite imagery of the same area each day.

Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS)
FIRMS was developed to provide near real-time active fire data to natural resource managers who face challenges obtaining timely satellite-derived fire information. Active fire data are made available within three hours of satellite observation from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite and the NOAA-20 satellite via LANCE.

Near Real-Time Data
LANCE provides access to near real-time (NRT) data products from a number of instruments in fewer than three hours from data acquisition. The system supports application users who are interested in monitoring and analyzing a wide variety of natural and man-made phenomena. If you are unsure which data set best meets your needs, you can browse the NRT data by topic on the Hazards and Disasters page.

Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS)
Access global, full-resolution imagery from over 900 satellite imagery products via a variety of standards-based set of web services, such as Web Map Tile Services (WMTS), Tiled Web Map Service (TWMS), Web Map Services (WMS), and Keyhole Markup Language (KML).

Rapid Response
Rapid Response was the precursor to Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), Worldview and Worldview Snapshots. Rapid Response has been providing subset and global swath imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) since 2001 but is now being phased out.

There are many other ways to access individual data collections. If you are unsure which tools meet your needs, see the Getting Started page.