NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) has completed processing the historical archive of the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data into Version 4 products. All 4.7+ million ASTER observations from 2000 to 2025 are now available for the 11 ASTER Version 4 products.
ASTER Version 4 incorporates modern atmospheric, geometric, and terrain correction inputs that improve the accuracy, consistency, and usability of ASTER products compared to earlier versions. Updated atmospheric correction using Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2), which is available globally for the entire time series, provides more physically consistent surface reflectance and thermal retrievals across the entire archive.
Version 4 also includes improved terrain correction and geolocation through the use of updated ground control points and elevation datasets. As a result, ASTER Version 4 provides consistent geolocation, enabling more precise alignment with Landsat, Sentinel-2, and other contemporary Earth observation datasets, and supporting reliable time-series and multi-sensor analyses.
In addition, most ASTER Version 4 products are now distributed in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format in NASA’s Earthdata Cloud, supporting efficient access, subsetting, and analysis in cloud-based and high-performance computing environments.
For additional information about ASTER V4 data products, including guidance on proper citation, refer to the dataset landing pages linked in the Referenced Datasets section below. Explore and access the new ASTER V4 data products using NASA’s Earthdata Search. The ASTER Data Resources GitHub Repository also includes Python tutorials that demonstrate how to programmatically access and work with ASTER data. Check out the Final ASTER Data Processing Campaign feature article and the ASTER Version 4 User Guide for additional information on Version 4 improvements. Please contact LP DAAC User Services with any questions.