The OGC-standard Compliant Global Landsat Data Server

 

Liping Di, Peisheng Zhao, Yaxing Wei, and Yang Liu

Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS)

George Mason University

 

Landsat data is one of longest remotely sensed time-series products. The data has been widely used in all aspects of remote sensing applications. Several years ago, NASA made the global coverage of best quality Landsat data for year 2000, 1990, and 1975 available to the user community free of charge. These freely available datasets are geometrically corrected in UTM projection and stored as standard Landsat scenes in GeoTiff format. The total amount of data is about 17.5 Tb. How to make the Landsat data easily accessible to the user community is a big issue. As a part of CEOS WGISS activities, the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS), George Mason University, has developed and operated a Landsat data server for making the Landsat data available to the user community through the standard Catalog Service for the Web (CSW) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) protocols developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The data server allows users to discover the data they want and to obtain the discovered data in the format, projection, spatial coverage, and spatial resolution they specify. This paper describes the development and operation of the Landsat data server.