My Taxes paid for that satellite... can I at least have pix?

September 27, 2009 4:43 PM

I want to download a bit of Landsat data - two small countries worth - but can't find any way to efficiently do this via GloVis or elsewhere. Where can I just select places on a map (or use my GloVis-exported) scene list to download these in bulk? Given 200MB/scene and the 80 scenes I need, it'll be 15.6 gigs downloaded (and likely around 40 unzippped), but that's not the problem; there just doesn't seem to be a way to do this.

Also, huge bonus for any source that offers even a rough natural color (simulated) version of these files so that I don't have to do the merging myself. GeoTIFF is probably the format I'm going for (I'm using a completely open-source stack, and may have access to an ArcGIS install, but it's way way inconvenient for me).

Yes, this is an obscenely specific and obscure question. I guess I am testing the outskirts of askmeta utility by asking this one, but seeing all of these interfaces to the data and high prices and all of this bs, I have a feeling that smart people must know a better way to get lots of this data in a good form quickly.

Thanks!

posted by tmcw to technology (3 answers total)

I find EarthExplorer a little bit easier to do bulk downloads, but unfortunately (as far as I know), there's no easy way to do this.

Are you looking to download 80 scenes from the same time period, or 4 scenes from 20 time periods?
posted by one_bean at 7:13 PM on September 27, 2009

@one_bean: I'm looking to download 80 scenes from a recent time period - really the purpose of the data is to make a custom satellite layer for web maps (merge/join/render with Mapnik/S3). Multiple time periods are kind of a disadvantage and the data doesn't need to be up-to-the-minute or even year. I find it a little tricky with EarthExplorer to just get an area and just one period per scene?
posted by tmcw at 7:56 PM on September 27, 2009

Looks like this problem might have been solved with hacking. I just wrote a little addon to landmerge which reads a glovis scene list file and downloads all the scenes from FTP. I'll know by the morning whether FTP will throttle me or not, but for now it seems to be working. I'll roll a patch. (also, er, definitely not using landmerge for actual merging. who the heck is okay with jpeg map output?)
posted by tmcw at 9:37 PM on September 27, 2009