Landsat is an ongoing mission of Earth observation satellites developed under a joint program of the USGS and NASA. The Landsat mission provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land, dating back to 1972 and the Landsat 1 satellite. Starting with Landsat 4, each of the satellites imaged the Earth's surface at a 30-meter resolution about once every two weeks using multispectral and thermal instruments.
This Cloud Storage dataset includes the Collection 1 USGS archive from Landsat 4, 5, 7, and 8:
- Landsat 4: 1982 - 1993
- Landsat 5: 1984 - 2013
- Landsat 7: 1999 - 2021
- Landsat 8: 2013 - 2021
Thanks to the open data policies of USGS and NASA, this dataset is available for free as part of the Google Public Cloud Data program. It can be used by anyone as part of Google Cloud.
Dataset structure
These Landsat images are processed to Level 1, which means they are orthorectified, map-projected images containing radiometrically-calibrated data. See the Landsat Level-1 Standard Data Products page, in particular the Data Users Handbooks, for additional details.
The images are stored in the GeoTIFF file format, with each spectral band stored in a separate file for easy access. The images are organized in the Worldwide Reference System (WRS-2) grid, which is a global grid dividing the world into 251 orbital paths and 248 rows. Different Landsat satellites have used sensors with slightly different characteristics, so Cloud Storage organizes the data by sensor in the following effective directory structure:
/SENSOR_ID/01/PATH/ROW/SCENE_ID/
The components of this path are:
SENSOR_ID: An identifier for the particular satellite and camera sensor.01: An indicator that the data is part of Landsat Collection 1.PATH: The WRS path number.ROW: The WRS row number.SCENE_ID: The unique scene ID.
As an example, one Landsat 8 scene over California can be found here:
gs://gcp-public-data-landsat/LC08/01/044/034/LC08_L1GT_044034_20130330_20170310_01_T2/
Dataset access
The image data can be used easily with any software that recognizes GeoTIFF files. Each scene also includes metadata in an accompanying text file.
To help locate data of interest, an index CSV file of the Landsat data is available. This CSV file lists basic properties of the available images, including their acquisition dates and their spatial extent as minimum and maximum latitudes and longitudes. The file is found in the Landsat Cloud Storage bucket:
gs://gcp-public-data-landsat/index.csv.gz
Alternatively, this index data is available in BigQuery for you to easily query using SQL. Note that to use BigQuery, you must have a user account and create a Google Cloud project.
Google Earth Engine
One way that you can query, visualize, and analyze the Landsat data
is by using Google Earth Engine, where the data is available in
image collections in the LANDSAT/ folder.
About the dataset
Dataset Source: U.S. Geological Survey.
Category: Satellite imagery, Geo.
Terms of service: See the Google Cloud console Landsat landing page.
Update Frequency: Landsat scenes taken prior to January 1, 2022 are added as they become available. Data is typically available 1-2 days after publishing by USGS. After January 1, 2022, new Landsat acquisitions are no longer processed into Collection 1, and consequently not included in this Cloud Storage dataset.
Format: GeoTIFF plus ancillary data.
Cloud Storage Location: gs://gcp-public-data-landsat (located in the US multi-region).