Landsat-8 on AWS Reader

The Landsat-8 on AWS Raster reader provides FME with access to data in the Landsat-8 format stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Landsat-8 Product and System Requirements

Format

Product

Operating System

Reader/Writer

FME Desktop License

FME Server

FME Cloud

Windows 64-bit

Linux

Mac

Reader

Available in FME Professional Edition and higher

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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 Landsat 8 by Landsat Missions. Specifically, for information about interpreting the quality assessment band, see Landsat Collection 2 Quality Assessment Bands.

Landsat-8 AWS Data

As part of a public datasets initiative, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with NASA and the USGS to provide Landsat-8 data in a Requester Pays bucket on AWS S3. The Landsat-8 on AWS reader provides access to the Collection 2 Landsat-8 Level-1 data. It has all the functionality of the underlying Landsat-8 Reader, with additional search capabilities particular to the AWS dataset. The imagery can be searched by date and geographic area of interest.

All Landsat-8 data from 2015 onward is available, along with some cloud-free scenes from 2013-2014.

For more information about the AWS-hosted Landsat-8 data, please see the Registry of Open Data on AWS (USGS Landsat).

Note: In 2022, the AWS bucket containing Landsat-8 Collection 1 data was deprecated. Collection 1 Level-1 data prior to 2022 will be available free of charge directly from USGS until the end of 2022. The Collection 2 data is now stored in a Requester Pays bucket on AWS, so users will need to replace readers in workspaces created before FME 2022.0 in order to provide credentials.

Reader Overview

The Landsat-8 on AWS Raster Reader downloads Landsat-8 data from Amazon S3 based on a spatial filter and a date filter.

Downloaded GeoTIFF files will contain all resolutions available for the band.

Note: On Windows, this format caches downloads in the temp folder. FME attempts to limit the size of the cache based on the value specified in the Cache Limit field under Tools > Options > Translation> Web File Cache.

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