I don't know if it still works, but a couple of years ago I hacked together a method for downloading the US Seamless National Elevation Dataset in bulk that might work for topo raster maps too.
To bypass the map viewer put the
coords on the URL like so:
http://extract.cr.usgs.gov/Website/distreq/RequestSummary.jsp?AL=71.0,56.0,-140.0,-150.0&PL=NAK01HZ
where this is your region of interest
north,south and east,west in decimal
degrees.
AL=71.0,56.0,-140.0,-150.0
and this is data set to choose from,
in this case “National Elevation
Dataset Alaska (NED) 2 Arc Second”
PL=NAK01HZ
If you use this technique, please be gentle. It’s not in our interests to force them to take protective measures and close this avenue.
Also don't overlook snail mail, it's high latency but has almost limitless bandwidth:
With regard to ordering the regional
CD’s:
“You can order the entire U.S. in 30
meter resolution in either ArcGrid or
GridFloat format. The data will be
provided on a 250 GB external drive at
a total price of $1005.00. This
includes shipping and handling. This
will cover the Conterminous U.S.,
Alaska (at 60 meter res), Hawaii, and
the territorial islands. We no longer
provide this on CD or DVD media.”
An incredibly good price in my
opinion.
The contact address is
webmapping@usgs.gov
Customer Service/Webmapping
Data and Applications Support
Department Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC) at
U.S. Geological Survey - EROS (Earth
Resources Observation and Science)
47914 252nd Street Sioux Falls, SD
57198-0001
Phone: 1-800-252-4547
Fax: (605)-594-6589
This can be done with the OGC standard WCS. Think that WCS is something like WFS but for raster.
But, as @simogeo explains
If your goal is to download plain geotif files with no processing
(crop, scale, reproject) I would suggest to go for a specific WPS
process (that you have to create) that simple give access to the
original file. I mean, using WCS to extract the original file is a bit
of an overkill, if you need to exchange the dump of the database with
N persons you would do the dump one and then use that rather than
doing a select all and writing to an output file N times, right?
As an alternative you may want to expose your data via FTP or HTTP and put those links in the layer metadata so people can reach the file
directly.
Best Answer
Landsat 8 data is offline for recalibration from 3 Feb 2013 for up to approx 50 days.