News DEA Landsat 9 Collection 3 Analysis Ready Data now available

Launched in September 2021, the Landsat 9 satellite is used to gather information to help contribute to the monitoring, understanding and managing of Earth's natural environments and resources.

Geoscience Australia has recently finalised the collection and reprocessing of the Landsat 9 Collection 3 Analysis Ready Data (ARD) and will make it freely available as part of the Digital Earth Australia Open Data Cube.

Landsat 9 Collection 3 contains the images from the Landsat 9 satellite over Australia, collected from September 2021 to today. The data has been validated, calibrated, and adjusted for Australian conditions for easy analysis across the entire continent.

As new images are captured by the Landsat 9 satellite they are added to the collection as soon as possible and marked as Near Real Time (NRT) in the metadata. However, the speed at which these data become available means they are not at the highest quality. NRT images are replaced with higher quality images, marked as Final, when the ancillary datasets needed to produce them become available. If there is a delay in the availability of ancillary data, an Interim version may also be produced.

For more information about the Near Real Time and Final concepts, and tips for working with this data, see our dataset maturity guide.

User tip: Did you know Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 also use the same maturity concept? This means that it’s easier to access the latest data in all of Geoscience Australia’s satellite data collections.

How to access the data:

• You can browse the Landsat 9 Collection 3 data in DEA Maps.
• To help you get started working with the Landsat collections, Geoscience Australia provides an introductory notebook in the Digital Earth Australia Sandbox containing worked examples for loading and using the data.
• Landsat 9 Collection 3 data is also freely available through the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Since the 2021 launch of Landsat 9 the USGS have identified important improvements to the image calibration and processing. The Landsat 9 data used in our DEA Surface Reflectance product passes on these improvements to users.

For more information, refer to the USGS website.