NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) – Hosted by CIESIN at Columbia University

Urban Landsat

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Urban Landsat: Cities from Space, v1 (1999 – 2003)

The data contained in the downloadable archives (zip files) includes jpeg images of 66 urban areas and binary, raw input data for a subset (28 total) of these countries.  Each image shows a Landsat false color composite in UTM projection.  The R/G/B layers correspond to TM/ETM+ bands 7/4/2.  Each pixel is 30x30 meters in area and most images are 30x30 km in area.  A 2% linear stretch has been applied to the images.

The Landsat data files contain six reflected bands of calibrated exoatmospheric reflectance stored in ENVI band sequential (BSQ) format. Geographic coordinates are included in the header file.  The data file contains 1000x1000x6 4 byte floating point numbers as indicated in the header.

Further information is available from the Landsat Data Users Handbook.

Analyses of the images are described in:
Small, C., Global Analysis of Urban Reflectance, International Journal of Remote Sensing, v.26, n.4, p.661-681, 2005.