Free For All – USGS LandsatLook Viewer

Are you a regular user of Landsat satellite imagery? Or perhaps you are interested in looking at changes in our landscape since 1999? If so, the recently launched USGS LandsatLook Viewer is the website for you! By far, this is the most user friendly interface I have seen yet that lets you browse Landsat data from any location on the planet online with full resolution previews; as well as select tiles to download in TIFF format for your own offline projects.

Browsing imagery online is a relatively intuitive process with the large Select Scenes button and the time slider; what is not as easy to figure out perhaps is how to download the raw Landsat files. Once you have selected the location you are interested in and then pressed the Select Scenes button, you can download data by:

1. Pressing the Table button, selecting the scenes you want with the Checkboxes and then pressing the Add to Cart button.
2. An alternative way to select scenes for download is to do this one at a time by viewing the image you like online, pressing the Metadata button and then Add to Cart.
3. Once you have selected the scenes you want to download, be sure you are looking at the Table, then switch the pull down menu at the top left to, Showing: Cart; now select all the scenes you want to download from the list and press the button Get Landsat Data.

Other great features of this online Landsat viewer include:

• An advanced query that lets you set the date range to search; the Landsat sensors to include in the search; and the maximum cloud cover.
• The ability to apply several stretches to online previews to get a better look at the imagery.
• A transparency setting to see the road and/or topographic map below. Several basemaps that you can toggle between.

Until my next edition of Free For All!, happy hunting for free GIS data!

Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988
Brock@apollomapping.com