Landsat-8 Reader

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Desktop Professional Edition.

The Landsat-8 reader provides FME with access to data in the Landsat-8 format.

Landsat-8 on AWS

As part of a public data initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with NASA and the USGS to provide Landsat-8 data free-of-charge on AWS S3. The Landsat-8 on AWS Reader provides access to this resource. It has all the functionality of the Landsat-8 Reader, with additional search capabilities particular to the AWS dataset. The imagery can be searched by date and geographic area of interest.

Overview

Landsat-8 is an Earth-imaging satellite administered by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The Landsat 8 satellite carries two instruments: the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS). Data is provided as 11 grayscale bands at a depth of 16 bits, along with a quality assessment band, also at 16 bits. However, sensor resolution is only at 12 bits, or 4096 gray levels.

The data is available at no charge directly from the USGS.

For more information about Landsat 8, please see https://landsat.usgs.gov/landsat-8. Specifically, for information about interpreting the quality assessment band, see https://landsat.usgs.gov/qualityband.

Reader Overview

The FME Landsat-8 reader accepts Landsat-8 Level 1 data, which consists of a text metadata file, and a single band GeoTIFF raster for each Landsat band.

The reader supports UTM coordinate systems in the dataset. A raster may contain tiles that cross UTM zone boundaries, but the raster will be treated as belonging to one zone.

Each LANDSAT8 dataset produces a single feature per Landsat band per WRS grid square. Each LANDSAT8 product folder contains a text metadata file, with a suffix of _MTL, and a txt extension. The reader processes this file to find the filenames for the individual GeoTIFF files in the product. A previous version of the metadata format may also be present in some product folders. It will have a suffix of _MTLold.txt, and is not compatible with the Landsat-8 reader.

FME Raster Features

FME raster features represent raster data and use several concepts that are unlike those used in the handling of vector data. The topics below describe how FME processes raster data.

About FME Rasters Tiling and Mosaicking
Raster Properties Band Combining and Separating
Band Properties Band and Palette Selection
Palette Properties Raster Processing
Compression Raster versus Vector Features
Pyramiding Raster File Naming
Interleaving World Files
Interpretation and Data Type TAB Files
Palette Resolution