Eyes on Earth
Episodes
Eyes on Earth Episode 35 – Watching the Water Supply with OpenET
05 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 im...
Eyes on Earth Episode 34 – Open Training Data
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today, the world is awash in remotely sensed data. Satellites launched by countries and commercial companies circle the planet collecting data every d...
Eyes on Earth Episode 33 – Global Land Change
08 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Mapping land cover across the United States using Landsat satellite data is a difficult, time-intensive job, but there are jobs far larger. Matt Hanse...
Eyes on Earth Episode 32 - Lunar Calibration
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Calibration teams at the USGS EROS Center use a variety of methods to make sure the data collected by Landsat satellites are an accurate representatio...
Eyes on Earth Episode 31 – Landsat 7 Flight Operations
10 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just recently, in mid-July, the flight operations team charged with keeping the Landsat 7 satellite running smoothly achieved a major milestone. They ...
Eyes on Earth Episode 30 – Remapping LANDFIRE
27 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the days before LANDFIRE, fire scientists often struggled to find the vegetation and fuels data they needed to map the path of fires, keep firefigh...
Eyes on Earth Episode 29 – Tracking Landscape Change with LCMAP
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. Geological Survey took a bold step toward documenting change across the landscape with the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972. Sin...
Eyes on Earth Episode 28 - Peer Reviews
29 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Remote sensing is not an especially venerable scientific discipline, at least in comparison to fields like biology, chemistry or medicine. From its be...
Eyes on Earth Episode 27 - Australian Wildfires
15 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The continent of Australia experienced some of the most devastating wildfires in its history in late 2019 and early 2020. Remote sensing scientists in...
Eyes on Earth Episode 26 – Satellite Constellations
01 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Between them, Landsats 7 and 8 image the entire land surface of Earth every eight days. The USGS orbiters are just two of many Earth observing satelli...
Eyes on Earth Episode 25 - Rising Seas
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sea levels are rising globally. In some places, it is rising more than others, threatening communities and people as storm surges reach further inland...
Eyes on Earth Episode 24 - Wildfire Risk to Communities
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. has plenty of data on wildfire risk. There are local and regional risk assessments, complex datasets like LANDFIRE and tracking tools like th...
Eyes on Earth Episode 23 – Ecosystem Monitoring
20 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Landsat satellites offer a wealth of information to scientists studying ecosystem health and recovery. Data products derived from Landsat open even mo...
Eyes on Earth Episode 22 – Meet the Mendenhall Fellow
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Mendenhall Program offers a range of two-year post-doctoral research fellowships within the U.S. Geological Survey. Heather Tollerud took advantag...
Eyes on Earth Episode 21 - Forests of Ghana
06 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the West African nation of Ghana, tropical forests are more than landscape. They are woven into language, custom, and culture. They are also the so...
Eyes on Earth Episode 20 - Mapping Alaska's Permafrost
23 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Arctic is changing at a more rapid rate than the rest of the planet. Some of the most significant changes are tied to the thawing of near-surface ...
Eyes on Earth Episode 19 – 100 Million Landsat Downloads
13 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, each Landsat image had a price tag – a hefty one at times, ranging from \$400 to as much as \$4,000. That all changed in 2008 with the ...
Eyes on Earth Episode 18 — Landsat's International Partners
09 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Across the planet, in rural settings on uncluttered landscapes, there are satellite antennas receiving data directly from Landsat satellites as they p...
Eyes on Earth Episode 17 - Evapotranspiration
24 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy enough to measure rainfall, and nearly as easy to measure streamflow. Calculating the efficiency of water use through the metric of evapot...
Eyes on Earth Episode 16 – Predictive Modeling
09 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Land cover and land use across the United States are the culmination of a complex web of interwoven factors: Climate, landscape types, and economic fa...
Eyes on Earth Episode 15 – Burn Severity Mapping
27 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists at EROS have spent years refining their approach to mapping burn severity using remotely-sensed data from satellites like Landsat, but Land...
Eyes on Earth Episode 14 – Space Debris
13 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sixty years of manned and unmanned space flight have left a cosmic junkyard circling the planet. In 2017, the U.S. government reported that it logged ...
Eyes on Earth Episode 13 – Land Use
30 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Summary: Scientists at EROS use tools like Landsat to produce land cover maps, which tell us if landscapes are rural or urban, cropped or forested, we...
Eyes on Earth Episode 12 – Plant Health via Satellite (NDVI)
16 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A farmer at the foot of a corn stalk can tell how well the plant is faring. That same farmer might survey his entire field for crop health. But assess...
Eyes on Earth Episode 11 - EROS Fall Poster Session
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Each fall, EROS invites its staff scientists and area graduate students to visit for a noontime poster session. The poster sessions offer a change for...
Eyes on Earth Episode 10 – Landsat and Water Quality
02 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We tend to associate Landsat satellites with what we see on solid Earth, but they can also tell us much about the health of our inland and coastal eco...
Eyes on Earth Episode 9 – Famine Early Warning
18 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly 85 million people around the world are currently considered “food insecure,” and that figure continues to grow. Remote sensing technology e...
Eyes on Earth Episode 8 – Assessing America’s Cropland
16 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) uses data from satellites like Landsat to estimate crop types and crop yields...
Eyes on Earth Episode 7 – Training Iraqi Scientists
04 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
EROS scientists track water availability and crop health around the world to help governments and non-profits manage resources and stave off food shor...
Eyes on Earth Episode 6 - Satellites 101
21 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How much does an Earth observation satellite weigh? How are they launched? How fast does it travel? Does Landsat have a gas tank? In this episode of E...
Eyes on Earth Episode 5 – Declassified Data at EROS
14 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a lot more than Landsat in the EROS Archive. In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we hear from a professor who’s mined satellite data collect...
Eyes on Earth Episode 4 - Cataloging Earth Observation Satellites
23 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Earth observation used to be the province of a handful of countries with satellite technology. Today, hundreds of satellites built all over the world ...
Eyes on Earth - Episode 3 - The National Land Cover Database
16 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sorting Landsat data into an accurate and reliable record of land cover in the United States is one of the most important jobs at EROS. This episode o...
Eyes on Earth Episode 2 - Chernobyl
09 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When an accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's No. 4 reactor in Ukraine on April 26, 1986, Landsat satellites were among the first t...
Eyes on Earth Episode 1 - Intro to EROS
02 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A rundown of the history of the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, the Landsat program, and the Center's role in the observat...