More than 85,000 satellite images from government agencies are now available on the Amazon Web Services Inc.’s (AWS) public data collection.
The imagery is from the Landsat Project, which is a joint effort between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. It’s described as the “world’s longest continuously acquired space-based moderately-resolution land remote sensing data collection.”
The USGS site states that the project contains imagery from more than 40 year of monitoring. It serves as an important data source to researchers and other people working on disaster relief and agriculture, geology and forestry, regional planning and education, mapping, and global change research projects.
The site states that the Landsat Project is a joint effort between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). It collects data to support government, civilian, industrial, military, and educational communities across the U.S.
Satellite imagery data is available for free from the government since 2008. However, AWS allows researchers, developers, and others to access the resource more easily.
“Because imagery is available on AWS researchers and software developers can utilize any of our on demand services to perform analysis, create new products, and not need to worry about storage and bandwidth costs,” Jed Sundwall, AWS executive, stated last week in a blog posting.
He also pointed out third-party tools that were specifically updated for this purpose, such the open-source landsat-util tool library, which Development Seed updated so that it can access Landsat data via AWS.
Other companies have also worked with Landsat data in AWS tests and have created visualization and continuously refreshing map projects.
AWS hosts on GitHub scripts that are used to acquire and process Landsat Data, including imagery from the Landsat 8 satellite launched in 2013.
You can find instructions on how to access the data on the Landsat site on AWS.
AWS adds satellite imagery to the public data set
