Landsat Science News Digest banner image featuring a Landsat image with white text on the top. To the left is the NASA meatball and at the bottom right is "April 2025".

May 5, 2025

Landsat image of Macaya National Park in western Haiti.

Haiti lost nearly half of its primary forests—often called old-growth forests—between 1996 and 2022, according to Hong et al., 2025, published in Remote Sensing of Environment that analyzed nearly 30 years of Landsat imagery. The Dominican Republic, which shares an island with Haiti, lost around 20.5% of its primary forest during the same period.

Tracking Primary Forests

NASA 2025 Earth Day poster. "Earth Day" is spelled out in Landsat letters.

May 1, 2025

NASA Celebrates Earth Day with Your Name in Landsat

On April, 22, 2025, NASA celebrated Earth Day as only NASA can: with beautiful imagery of our home planet. Download this year’s Earth Day poster and see your name in Landsat.

Dana Ostrenga, Project Manager of NASA’s Commercial Satellite and Data Acquisition program, surrounded by graphics representing data acquisition.

April 9, 2025

Data Wrangling with Dana Ostrenga

Data interoperability expert Dana Ostrenga explains how government and commercial Earth observation satellites provide broader support to the scientific community when used together.

alt="Maps of the canopy height of trees in southern Florida before and after Hurricane Milton in 2024. After the hurricane, the tree canopy height is lower in some regions than before the storm."

March 28, 2025

Mapping Forest Damage from Hurricane Milton on Florida’s West Coast

Rising sea levels and increased ocean temperatures are supercharging hurricanes. Using Landsat data can help monitor vulnerable ecosystems.

"Landsat 7 data have been pivotal in documenting environmental changes such as natural disasters, deforestation, and urban growth over its 25 years. Notably capturing significant events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Australian bushfires in 2019 - 2020, the dramatic growth of cities worldwide and more through its long-standing mission.”

—David Applegate, USGS Director, September 2024

End of an era: Historic Landsat 7 mission takes final images

Upcoming Events

The Landsat Public Engagement Team will be participating in the following event in May 2025:

Odyssey of the Mind

May 21-24, 2025

Michigan State University

East Lansing, Michigan

PUBLICATION SPOTLIGHT

The Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 version 2.0 surface reflectance dataset

| Ju et al., 2025

In the July issue of Remote Sensing of Environment, a team of researchers unveiled the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) version 2.0 surface reflectance dataset and algorithms (Ju et al., 2025). The team included seven NASA co-authors, members of the 2018-2023 Landsat Science Team, and the European Space Agency. HLS V2.0 was completed in summer 2023 and now the full dataset is available in Google Earth Engine and AWS, offering 30m data at near-global coverage from 2013. Compared with HLS V1.4, the most recent publicly available HLS product, HLS V2.0 has improvements in atmospheric correction, cloud masking, and bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) correction. HLS V2.0 also extends to near-global coverage (excluding Antarctica)—as compared with V1.4, which covered only about 30% of the land surface—and integrates Landsat 8, 9, and Senintel-2 A, B and C. In 2022, the first whole year where two Landsat and two Sentinel-2 satellites were collecting data, HLS data had a 1.6 day repeat frequency and a global median of 66 cloud-free observations, a substantial improvement on using data from only Landsat or only Sentinel satellites.

Quarterly and annual number of cloud-free 30-m Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) observations for 2022. There are more observations in temperate regions than tropical ones.

Quarterly and annual number of cloud-free 30-m Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) observations in 2022. On average, the area with the lowest observations is around the equator. Credit: Ju et al., 2025

Find more selected Landsat publications on our website.

NASA Earth Observatory

Selected Landsat Images

April 19, 2025

Stirrings at Mount Spurr

Despite its stately and serene appearance, the Alaskan volcano has shown signs of activity since spring 2024.

A detailed satellite image displays white, snowy mountains with Mount Spurr's volcanic summit in the center. The vent on Crater Peak is near the bottom of the image and has slightly less snow cover. The bottom-left is vegetated and green, with a blue-green lake's margin visible in the corner.

April 17, 2025

Relics of a Red World in Bighorn Basin

Folds of rusted rock neighbor the Bighorn Canyon’s deep scar in the western United States.

A satellite image shows an orangish-red rock layer sharply folded in a backwards N shape in the mostly unvegetated Bighorn Basin of Montana and Wyoming. To the right of the fold, the Bighorn Canyon carves a winding path, roughly north-south, through the rock. It opens into a wider, water-filled area near the bottom of the image.

April 10, 2025

Building out Chattanooga

Signs of urban expansion cover parts of Tennessee’s “scenic city,” which is nestled along the meandering Tennessee River.

A second satellite image shows the same area in 2024. In several parts of the city and its suburbs, new development (gray) has replaced vegetated areas (green).

April 2, 2025

Floodwaters Surge Through the Australian Outback

Abundant rain in Queensland overfilled rivers, flooded towns, and submerged livestock grazing lands.

A false-color satellite image shows Cooper Creek in the Australian outback near Windorah. Water covers a floodplain that is tens of kilometers wide. Some clouds are present.

William T. Pecora Awards

Black and white image of William T. Pecora in front of a teal background. White text in the graphic reads: William T. Pecora Award, Accepting nominations now through May 30, 2025.

William T. Pecora award nominations are now being accepted until May 30, 2025.

Sponsored jointly by the DOI and NASA, the Pecora Award is presented annually to individuals or teams using satellite or aerial remote sensing that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth.

The award was established in 1974 to honor the memory of Dr. William T. Pecora, former Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and Under Secretary, Department of the Interior.

+ Submit a nomination

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