Over the course of the next four videos, Dr Mathias Disney and Tobias Reinicke will give a practical overview of how to work with different types of data portals and how to handle this data once acquired.

There are a range of options for seeing regular images from space – some allowing you to conduct your own research and some presenting you with completed images from space. For example, the NASA Worldview portal is updated daily with new imagery, which you can use to see large-scale optical changes such as smoke plumes and volcanic ash plumes . The Worldview portal allows for a small number of selections of different layers, but is limited. Other processed online images include those from NASA’s Earth Observatory and the ESA Earth from Space videos that explain particular features using images from space, without asking you to draw your own conclusions from raw data.

To allow you to delve a little deeper into using data from space, there are a few options for looking at satellite imagery.
Landsat data is freely available online in a few different layouts. Using the Glovis portal, you can select a given area on the globe and choose a satellite dataset to correspond with that area. There will normally not be images for every single day, but across the many years of the Landsat dataset, you should have a range of images available, which should allow you to get some cloud-free images. When you choose an area on the map on the portal, you are automatically given the whole images with all the spectral bands collected by the satellite. Depending on what data you want to download and display, you can look at images in different bands.

If you click on ‘Dataset’ and choose Landsat archive from the drop-down menu, you can view images from a number of different Landsat satellites and instruments. For Landsat 4 and 5 MSS, the images are displayed as RGB composites, bands 4, 2, and 1. For Landsat 1, 2, and 3 MSS, the RGB composites are created from bands 7, 5, and 4. These both correspond to near infrared, red and green, and vegetation on land is shown in bright red, as vegetation reflects near infrared radiation strongly.

Featured Educators:

• Dr Mathias Disney

Featured Data Products and Software Tools:

Glovis

Don’t forget you can download the video, transcript and take any quizzes available with the links on the right.