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Exercise 9c: Egypt remote sensing – Landsat

and ASTER image download

Due: due Monday, April 12 at the start of class.


Goal: to learn how to locate and download ASTER and Landsat data and to
download several Landsat images. You’ll learn how to use NASA’s WIST (Warehouse
Inventory Search Tool) and the GLCF (Global Land Cover Facility) sites.
Turn in: save your Landsat images to your hard drive, and print out (B&W is OK)
the ASTER browse pages for the good ASTER images you’ve found for the location;
download the ASTER images from the Data folder on the MSS.

Part I: the WIST site for ASTER images (and other satellite
data)
A. Setting the search parameters in WIST
1. As far as I’ve been able to determine, data searches and downloads at WIST work fine on a Mac.
2. Go to the main WIST page at
https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/~wist/api/imswelcome/
3. This page will tell you if the WIST site is down for some reason. If it’s down, come back later.
4. Go to Enter WIST. You will use the site as a guest.
5. You’ll see that there’s a tremendous amount of data from lots of different sources that are
accessible at the WIST site. We’re only going to look for ASTER data.
6. Set the search parameters as follows:
a. Choose Land, ASTER.
b. In the pulldown above the list with the radio buttons, choose L1A Reconstructed
Unprocessed Instrument Data V003.
c. Choose By discipline (that’s the default), Primary Data Search (also the default), and Type
in Lat/Lon Point (not the default).
d. Enter the lat/lon coordinates 24° 43’N, 30° 42’E (and notice that you have to enter the
numbers with a colon between the degrees and minutes).
e. Choose start date 01/01/2000; end date 01-01-2010
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B. Searching for images
1. Click Start Search, and be patient. The site will tell you how long your search has been running.
If the site is running fast, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two to find your images.
2. When your search results page comes up, you’ll see a list of what are called Data Granules –
these are the individual ASTER “tiles” that include all of the bands. At the bottom of your list,
you’ll see two click boxes if you have more than 10 granules. When I did this, I had 14 granules.
Just click on the 11-… box to see the next set of granules.
3. The Image QuickLook column lets you see a low-res browse image for your granule. Click on
Browse* for your first data granule. Be patient – don’t keep clicking – just wait until the image
comes up. The browse image comes up as three images – scroll down to see a browse image from
the three band sets (visible, short wave infrared, and thermal infrared).
4. Go back to the search results page, and click to see each of the browse images for the available
granules. You’ll see that not all of them would be worth ordering (some are cloud-covered, others
are just odd).
5. Choose three good ones, and put a check mark in the Select box for each of your three chosen
granules. Go back to the browse pages for each, and print out the browse page that shows the
three band sets for each.
6. Go back to the search results page, make sure the you have a check in the boxes for your three
granules, and click Add selections to cart. Click Accept – Continue to Shopping Cart.
7. At this point, you’re dead in the water unless you are an authorized user with an account. You
either have to pay for the imagery, have a NASA account for research, or have an educational
account that lets you download a certain number of granules. If you were an authorized user, you
could click Choose Options and select the ASTER products that you wanted. WIST would then
email you an ftp link where you could go download your data. I have done that for a couple of
ASTER images for all y’all, and we will work with them in class.
C. ASTER data for class
1. Go to our class data folder, and download the ASTER images in the folder, and save them to your
hard drive. Extract the files and get them ready to use. You can preview them in ArcCatalog.

Part II: The Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) for


download Landsat and other satellite data

A. Locating the right part of the GLCF


1. Go to the GLCF site at http://glcf.umd.edu/index.shtml As far as I can determine, this site also
works on a Mac.
2. Data and Products > Landsat
3. Under Date Access, choose the Search and Preview Tool (ESDI).
4. You’ll need to start by registering on the site. The image downloads are free, but you won’t be
able to download anything unless you are registered.
5. Once you’ve registered, log in and choose Map Lat/Lon.
6. Select ETM+ Landsat Imagery options.
7. Enter min and max latitude as follows (be sure to use the format indicated on the site!):
a. min lat: 24° 40’; max lat: 24° 45’
b. min lon: 30° 40’; max lon: 32° 0’
8. Click update map. If you’ve done everything correctly, the map should indicate 6 images.
9. Choose Preview and Download. Click on the number in the ID column to see the thumbnail of
any of the images.
10. Which images do you want?
a. First, you do not want ETM+ images that are more recent than May 31, 2003, because
the scan line corrector (SLC) on the ETM camera failed on May 31, 2003. On some site,
images acquired after that date are indicated as “SLC-off” images. They are still useful
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images, which is why NASA continues to release them, but, if you can acquire good
images that aren’t date-sensitive and are earlier than May 2003, you’re better off. If you
want to read more about the issue, go to
https://landsat.usgs.gov/products_slcoffbackground.php
b. On your search results list, note that the dates are identical for the pair of pre-2003
images. It doesn’t matter which pair you download. Either provider (USGS and EarthSat)
is fine – you don’t need to download both.
11. Choose one pair of the pre-2003 Landsat ETM+ images to download, and click on Download.
a. File and folder organization are going to be crucially important!
b. Your could download all the files listed, but you really only need to download the bands
circled below. You can’t shift click and download the files, but you can get three
downloads going at once. Once one has downloaded, you can get another one going, for
three total at any one time. BTW – Band 8 is twice the resolution and takes twice as long
to download as any of the others.

c. The 61 and 62 bands are very low resolution thermal infrared bands, and you have better
data from ASTER for thermal infrared. The .met file is the metadata, but it’s in the file
headers and will come in to ArcMap with the .tifs that you download. And you don’t need
the browse images.
d. Once you’ve downloaded the bands for the first image, download the second set. Expand
all of the files.

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