Earth is covered in more than 57 million square miles of land, comprising nearly 30% of the planet’s entire surface. Land surface research includes investigating shrinking forests, warming land, eroding soils and other developments and processes. NASA’s Earth-observing satellites and instruments provide key data for this research such as surface temperature, land cover area, land use, topography, soil moisture, and vegetation cover.

Our vast land surface data products include land interferograms, vegetation type maps, land surface atmospheric boundary interaction measurements, soil moisture levels, fire and thermal anomaly detection, and global shuttle radar topography surveys.