GIS at NASA: Expanding the Understanding of Earth Science

Discover, explore, and access GIS content to help you better understand Earth science using NASA's free and open data. Using GIS, you can leverage NASA's Earth observations to perform analysis, create maps, and develop applications.

Explore NASA Earth Observation Data

NASA data are available without restriction. Explore recent uses of data incorporating GIS technology.

 

See GIS in Action

Collaborate and create interactive applications combining high value data together in an interactive, informative, web-based application. Focusing on key topics or themes allows users to see the best available data from NASA to help them understand complex challenges facing our world.

Drought Web App
Flooding Web App
Tropical Storm Web App

Datasets have a story to tell. Engage and inspire your audience by combining text, images, and other multimedia content with maps. You have the local knowledge and expertise; now begin and sustain a meaningful connection with your users.

Learn about NASA Earthdata as Image Services
Image
MODIS Terra true color reflected image

Image services are a way to process and share collections of imagery. This provides considerable flexibility and scalability for storing, processing, analyzing, and sharing imagery and raster products. These flexible and robust services can be comprised of a variety of data types, both large and small, and can be multiband or multidimensional.

These services leverage a powerful server backend to perform the required processing on-the-fly and dynamic mosaicking of images. These applications can access the imagery as a seamless mosaic or query into the metadata of each image to display only a selection of the data or apply processing across datasets to find differences or perform classification. These processes can include reprojection, orthorectification, clipping, the application of complex image processing algorithms, and more.

Clients can connect to image services using an ArcGIS Server connection or via REST. Additionally, image services can be published with the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) or Web Coverage Service (WCS) capabilities. By adding additional capabilities, clients can access your image service in an expanded variety of applications and devices.

ArcGIS Image Services can also be accessed and used inside open source tools such as QGIS and Jupyter Notebooks.

See NASA Data as Image Services in Action
Find and Use Image Services
Card image cap
Sentinel-2 Views

Sentinel-2 10 m multispectral, multitemporal, 13-band images with visual renderings and indices. This imagery layer is sourced from the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2 mission on Amazon Web Services (AWS) collections and is updated daily with new imagery.

Card image cap
Multispectral Landsat

Landsat multispectral and multitemporal imagery with on-the-fly renderings and indices for visualization and analysis. The Landsat 8 and 9 imagery in this layer is updated daily and is directly sourced from the USGS Landsat collection on AWS.

Card image cap
True Color - Corrected

This visualization represents a true color band combination (1-4-3) of data collected by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite and is most similar to how we see Earth’s surface.

Card image cap
Earth at Night (2016)

This layer presents a nighttime view of Earth that provides an informational and educational view of our planet.

Card image cap
Pansharpened Landsat

Landsat pansharpened and multitemporal 15 m imagery rendered on-the-fly as Natural Color with dynamic range adjustment (DRA) for visualization and analysis. It is updated daily with new imagery directly sourced from the USGS Landsat collection on AWS.

Card image cap
Landsat 8 Views

Landsat 8 multispectral and multitemporal imagery with on-the-fly renderings and indices for visualization and analysis. The imagery in this layer is updated daily and is directly sourced from the USGS Landsat collection on AWS.

Card image cap
Panchromatic

Landsat panchromatic and multitemporal 15 m imagery with on-the-fly renderings and indices for visualization and analysis. It is updated daily with new imagery directly sourced from the USGS Landsat collection on AWS.

Card image cap
Landsat GLS Multispectral

Landsat Global Land Survey (GLS) 30 m and 60 m multispectral and multitemporal imagery with on-the-fly renderings and indices for visualization and analysis.

see more

See More

Check out our GIS Resources playlist on the Earthdata YouTube channel.

engage

Engage With the Community

Discuss research needs, data, and data applications.

tips and tricks

GIS Tips and Tricks

Check out our Tutorials and Data Recipes.


See how NASA Earth observation data are fueling powerful, interactive climate applications. These applications deliver and visualize critical spatial information to help users better understand changing Earth systems.

Last Updated
Jun 28, 2022