Landsat 8 – How to Programmatically Retrieve Landsat 8 Satellite Images

amazon ec2downloadimagerylandsat 8

I have not been able to find out this myself, but is there a way to programmatically access Landsat 8 Satellite Images?

I know that I can go to USGS EarthExplorer to search and browse through the scenes, and even download them. But I do not want to download them to my own computer for two reasons, My internet is slow and my laptop have cooling issues.

So instead I figure I want to transfer the images directly to a “cloud”-instance for data processing. I would also be nice if I could download and process these images as they become available from USGS.

Best Answer

I saw a blog post from developmentseed for their command line utility landsat-util.

Power tools for Satellite Imagery

The landsat-util can be forked from github and compiled from source unless your OS offers it in a binary ready to go.

The blog describes it simply as:

a command line utility that makes it easy to search, download, and process Landsat imagery.

You can search based on date, cloud coverage % and other things, download immediately, or process once it's downloaded like pansharpen or stitch the images together.

You can preview images before you download. Search commands provide a link to a thumbnail for each image.

landsat search --cloud 4 --start "August 1 2013" --end "August 25 2014" country 'Vatican'

Using the --pansharpen flag will take longer to process but will produce clearer images.

landsat search --download --imageprocess --pansharpen --cloud 4 --start "august 11 2013" --end "august 13 2013" pr 191 031

You can also perform all processing on images that you previously downloaded.

landsat download LC81050682014217LGN00

landsat process --pansharpen /your/path/LC81050682014217LGN00.tar.bz

Here's a readme with more info.

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