Quite! Thanks for sharing!!! (Which listserver?)
I often have been concerned about USGS "collusion" with their
"cooperators" (if that is the correct term) whereby topos are sold at
rather healthy prices by commercial entities, and hope this signifies a
trend at the agency toward recovering actual costs from end-users rather
than allowing private entities exclusive "rights" to market "products"
that are produced at taxpayer expense.
I hope that these data also will be made available which shows cloud and
other atmospheric data such that the influence of those factors upon
habitat (e.g., insolation, evapotranspiration), particularly if
integrated with other data. If anyone is doing this kind of work, I
hope they will let us know about it (or at least bring me up to date).
It will be a bright day indeed, when "precipitation" alone is factored
into the atmospheric variables of habitat--and, for that matter,
"little" things like species distribution, diversity, population, and a
thousand other things that we are heir to, but have long ignored.
WT
PS: I wonder what prompted this action?
Lara Juliusson wrote:
Hello all, This came to me via another listserver, and I thought it would be
of interest here. cheers,
Lara Juliusson
Greetings, I just received the following announcement about the USGS plans on
making all Landsat data available for no-charge. Today, the USGS released a
technical announcement, outlining the plan for the release of no-charge Landsat
data. Over the next 9 months, we will be opening up the Landsat archive for
no-charge ordering. Please see the announcement below for details, and feel
free to contact any of the Landsat staff for more information. Imagery for
Everyone… Timeline Set to Release Entire USGS Landsat Archive at No Charge.
RESTON, VA – The USGS Landsat archive is an unequaled 35-year record of the
Earth’s surface that is valuable for a broad range of uses, ranging from
climate change science to forest management to emergency response, plus
countless other user applications. Under a transition toward a National Land
Imaging Program sponsored by the Secretary of the Interior, the USGS is
pursuing an aggressive schedule to provide users with electronic access to!
any Landsat scene held in the USGS-managed national archive of global scenes
dating back to Landsat 1, launched in 1972. By February 2009, any archive
scene selected by a user – with no restriction on cloud cover – will be
processed automatically to a standard product recipe, using such parameters as
the Universe Transverse Mercator projection, and staged for electronic
retrieval. In addition, newly acquired scenes meeting a cloud cover threshold
of 20% or below will be processed to the standard recipe and placed on line for
at least six months, after which they will remain available for selection from
the archive. Newly acquired, minimally cloudy Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic
Mapper Plus (ETM+) data covering North America and Africa are already being
distributed by the USGS over the Internet at no charge, with expansion to full
global coverage of incoming Landsat 7 data to be completed by July 2008 (see
timeline below). The full archive of historical Landsat 7 ETM+ data !
acquired by the USGS since launch in 1999 will become available for se
lection and downloading by the end of September 2008. At that time, all
Landsat 7 data purchasing options from the USGS, wherein users pay for
on-demand processing to various parameters will be discontinued. By the end
of December of 2008, both incoming Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) data and all
Landsat 5 TM data acquired by the USGS since launch (1984) will become
available, with all Landsat 4 TM (1982-1985) and Landsat 1-5 Multi-Spectral
Scanner (MSS) (1972-1994) data becoming available by the end of January 2009.
All Landsat data purchasing options from the USGS will be discontinued by
February 2009, once the entire Landsat archive can be accessed at no charge.
Landsat scenes can be previewed and downloaded using the USGS Global
Visualization Viewer at http://glovis.usgs.gov [under “Select Collection”
choose Landsat archive: L7 SLC-off (2003-present)]. Scenes can also be
selected using the USGS Earth Explorer tool at http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov
[under “Select Your!
Dataset” choose Landsat Archive: L7 SLC-off (2003-present)]. For further information on Landsat satellites and products, see http://landsat.usgs.gov End of official message Just as an FYI - to clarify some points in the announcement. This plan will only allow 1 recipe of data to be produced. L7 data will not have any gap correction applied. The 20% or less cloud cover images will be processed automatically, the higher cloud cover scenes will be processed as ordered with no plans for prioritization of orders.
Pixel size: 15m/30m/30m
Media type: Download (web-enabled)
Product type: L1T (terrain-corrected)
Output format: GeoTIFF
Map projection: UTM
Orientation: North up
Resampling: Cubic convolution
DEM: GLS DEM (SRTM, NED, CDAD, DTED, GTOPO 30) Please review the announcement and if you have any questions or comments please contact any or all of the following: Kristi Kline, PMP Landsat Project Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] James Lacasse, PMP Landsat Mission Management Officer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rachel Headley, PhDScientist, Landsat Project Data Acquisition Manager, Acting [EMAIL PROTECTED] ThanksBrenda Brenda K. Jones Disaster Response CoordinatorUSGS EROS Center47914 252nd StSioux Falls, SD 57198Phone 605.594.6503Fax 605.594.6150Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EMERGENCIESCELL: 605-321-3995
