[ Beneath the Waves ]

TMSB Tutorial 2: OnEarth Satellite Imagery

article by Ben Lincoln

 

Once you've familiarized yourself with using The Mirror's Surface Breaks using the instructions in TMSB Tutorial 1: Basic Use, you're ready to proceed to using the same general technique to process imagery from NASA's OnEarth website.

For the most part, the process is very similar. The main body of this article was going to be about how to obtain the source data for yourself, but unfortunately NASA shut down the non-tiled OnEarth WMS service (apparently indefinitely) around the beginning of 2011. If anyone knows of a way to obtain this type of image data now, in a losslessly-compressed format (PNG or TIFF preferred), please let me know.

Dear NASA staff: can you please turn that functionality back on? It was really great, and one of the few places that ordinary citizens could get ahold of losslessly-compressed mid-infrared and thermal images, among other things.

OnEarth Image Data

Prior to being shut down, the following distinct layers of satellite data were made available by the OnEarth server:

For more information on the specific LandSat 7 wavelengths, see the list near the end of the Calculated Greyscale Images article. The SRTM data is an unspecified combination of C- and X-band RADAR reflectance.

In keeping with the conventions used in the OnEarth URLs, the TMSB configuration which uses them uses this naming convention for the input files:

Working With OnEarth Data in TMSB

In order to fit in with the TMSB processing model, all of the images mentioned above are treated as "spectral bands", even though elevation is not a spectral band. This is a lot of source data, and if you include all of these bands in your input directory, you will generally end up with an extremely large number of input permutations. Therefore, there are three recommendations for cutting the number down a bit:

Once you have your source images, the process is the same as in The Mirror's Surface Breaks, with the following exceptions:

OnEarth Processing Screenshots
[ Your source directories should look something like this ]
Your source directories should look something like this
[ Be sure to select an OnEarth input configuration! ]
Be sure to select an OnEarth input configuration!
[ New and exciting processing configurations can be used ]
New and exciting processing configurations can be used
[ Processing satellite imagery ]
Processing satellite imagery
 

 

 
 
Download
File Size Version Release Date Author
Big Bend National Park 47 MiB 1.0 2011-02-21 NASA
A sample OnEarth image set for use with the TMSB tutorials. This set will generate output images that occupy about 20 MiB on disk for each variation in the selected processing configuration.
 
Download
File Size Version Release Date Author
Yellowstone National Park (And Cody, Wyoming) 67 MiB 1.0 2011-02-21 NASA
A sample OnEarth image set for use with the TMSB tutorials. This set will generate output images that occupy about 25 MiB on disk for each variation in the selected processing configuration.
 
Download
File Size Version Release Date Author
New York City (and Surrounding Area) 9 MiB 1.0 2011-02-21 NASA
A sample OnEarth image set for use with the TMSB tutorials. This set will generate output images that occupy about 5 MiB on disk for each variation in the selected processing configuration.
 
Download
File Size Version Release Date Author
Egypt (near Luxor) 13 MiB 1.0 2011-02-21 NASA
A sample OnEarth image set for use with the TMSB tutorials. This set will generate output images that occupy about 5 MiB on disk for each variation in the selected processing configuration.
 
Download
File Size Version Release Date Author
Global View of the Earth 4 MiB 1.0 2011-02-21 NASA
A sample OnEarth image set for use with the TMSB tutorials. This set will generate output images that occupy about 2 MiB on disk for each variation in the selected processing configuration. Note: not all spectral bands contain the full global view, so you may experience a "patchwork" effect.
 
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