National Land Imaging Program

The western wall of Uzbekistan's Sardoba Reservoir breached on May 1st, 2020 after a week of heavy rain. Thousands were evacuated as water rushed north into farmland and villages across the central Asian country and into neighboring Kazakhstan. Imagery from Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite shows water pooling across a wide area. In the May 4th image 3 days after

Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland is known to generate large icebergs, most notably in 2010 and 2012. Another large iceberg may be forming now. A new rift was spotted on the glacier in 2017. Since then, imagery from both Landsat and Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites show the rift lengthening and meeting up with and older crack. The potential iceberg could

This is EROS.

It's located just north of Sioux Falls in South Dakota in the United States on the planet Earth!

EROS stands for Earth Resources Observation and Science. It's a federal government facility where over 600 talented women and men work together to capture, store, and study images of the Earth taken from high above. Our Earth is always changing, and

Brazil is a fascinating study in water use. Brazil uses roughly 72 percent of its water for irrigated agriculture, and its herds of cattle, pigs and poultry are among the largest in the world. Water management teams from that country’s National Water Agency have worked in recent years with researchers from the USGS EROS Center to learn how to map, and therefore more

In the past, remote sensing scientists looked for change on the Earth’s surface primarily by comparing one Landsat image to another. Today, open access to Landsat data, high-performance and cloud computing capabilities and sophisticated algorithms can be used to scan the entirety of the archive for change, enabling researchers to learn more about how the landscape shifts

When a disaster like a hurricane, flood or major wildfire hits a remote part of the world, the International Charter Space and Natural Disasters springs into action. The Charter’s members collect and distribute satellite-derived data that documents the damage, as well as derived products like as fire perimeter or structural damage maps – all at no cost to national

The Green Revolution leaned on fertilizers, drought-resistant seeds and other modern innovations to boost agricultural production across much of the planet in the second half of the 20th Century. But many of those innovations never reached West Africa, partially because the lack of social safety nets and crop insurance made such investments too risky. On this episode of

As fire season continues in the western United States let's look back at a number of incidents tracked by officials across California in August. These fires were captured during the day by Landsats 7 and 8, in natural color bands of the visible spectrum. Landsat sensors also record infrared wavelengths revealing burn scars and active fires. Natural color images show smoke

Evapotranspiration is the process by which water transpires from the leaves and stems of plants and evaporates from the Earth’s surface. ET is an important metric for managing water use, but data availability has long been an issue. On this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk about OpenET, a bold initiative whose goal is to improve water management by making that water

In Russia's Extreme North, a widening chasm known as the Batagaika Crater provides a unique opportunity to study the past. Early declassified aerial images recorded the crater's growth in the 1960s and 1970s followed by multispectral sensor imagery captured by Landsat and Sentinel satellites, building a continuous view over the last 60 years. But the gash in the ground

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