Mapping Change to Texas Coastlines

The Texas coastline is a draw for residents and a hub for tourism and trade, but it is also the frequent target of hurricanes and faces risk from rising seas. Landsat data can be used to document damage from disasters such as hurricanes by mapping the extent of disturbance in the immediate aftermath and by improving pre-event models of impact and post-event models for recovery. Landsat also offers insights into broader long-term trends in coastal change. One study from 2017 mined the Landsat archive from 1986 to 2015 to detect changes and determined that nearly 53 percent of the Texas coastline had retreated (Xu, 2018).

Tracking Urban Heat from Above

The punishing summer heat of Texas is baked into American folklore, but its expanding cityscapes tend to bear the brunt of the mercury’s fury. Landsat’s thermal imaging capabilities can help scientists and city planners more efficiently study the urban heat island effect, whereby heat-trapping concrete and asphalt boost city temperatures by several degrees and sustain higher temperatures through the night. Tracking urban heat without satellite data can be costly, requiring hundreds of weather stations for an accurate accounting of block-by-block variations. Researchers at Texas Christian University recognized Landsat as a tool for tracking urban heat as early as 1995 while surveying Dallas (Aniello and others, 1995). Fast-forward to 2020, when researchers analyzed temperatures within local climate zones in the Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas (Zhao and others, 2020). Such studies support metropolitan authorities’ mitigation efforts that can save energy and protect human health.

Measuring and Managing Water Use

One in seven working Texans is employed in agriculture. Because more than one-half of the State’s water is used by the industry, wise water decisions are especially important. Landsat data can be used to estimate the largest and hardest-to-measure part of the water budget: the water lost through surface evaporation and transpiration from plant leaves and stems. The combined rate, called evapotranspiration (ET), amounts to a measure of water use efficiency that can guide water-use decisions and water allocations for irrigated croplands. A 2019 study on the Upper Rio Grande River Basin, which includes parts of west Texas, measured ET rates from 1986 through 2015 using the long time series of Landsat data to reveal long-term regional crop water-use patterns (Senay and others, 2019).

Landsat—Critical Information Infrastructure for the Nation

Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing data source within Federal civilian agencies. Local, State, Tribal, and Federal agencies use Landsat to monitor and forecast a wide range of land surface phenomena. Information from Landsat contributes to day-to-day decisions on land, water, and resource use that protect life and property; safeguard the environment; advance science, technology, and education; support climate change resiliency; and grow the U.S. economy. Landsat’s imagery provides a landscape-level view of land surface, inland lake, and coastal processes, both natural and human-induced. Landsat enables us to better understand the scope, nature, and speed of change to the natural and built environment.

Businesses draw upon Landsat data to provide customer-specific applications to improve logistics, resource allocation, and investment decisions. Commercial space imaging firms leverage Landsat data to refine product offerings and support new information services. A 2017 USGS study determined the total annual economic benefit of Landsat data in the United States. to be $2.06 billion, far surpassing its development and operating costs (Straub and others, 2019).

Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 provide 8-day repeat coverage of the Earth’s land surfaces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the USGS are currently reviewing the findings from a joint Architecture Study Team, which will inform the design and implementation approach for Landsat Next, the follow-on mission to Landsat 9. Landsat 9 and its successors are planned to provide a sustainable, space-based system to extend the 50-year Landsat series of high-quality global land imaging measurements—the world’s longest time series of the Earth’s land surface.

The long-term availability of consistent and accurate Landsat data, combined with a no-cost data policy, allows users to analyze extensive geographic areas and better understand and manage long-term trends in land surface change. New cloud computing and data analytics technologies use Landsat data in a wide range of decision-support tools for Government and industry. Much like global positioning systems and weather data, Landsat data are used every day to help us better understand our dynamic planet.