Welcome to the EROS User Experience webinar series, where we talked to staff and EROS to learn more about the data, tools and services coming out of the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science, or EROS Center. Today's webinar is entitled Exploring Earth Explorer. I'm your host, Danielle Golon, the remote sensing user services lead here at EROS in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The time is currently 12:00 PM central, so let's go ahead and get started. First, a few logistics to ensure the best audio experience. All participants have been muted. If you have any questions or comments during the webinar, please enter them in the chat and we will address them at the end of the webinar. Today's webinar is being recorded.

The recording will be available later in the help section of the USGS Earth Explorer, as well as on the USGS Trainings YouTube channel and the USGS Media Gallery. At the start and end of the webinar, we will have a few polling questions. Polls are optional, but your answers can help us create a better user experience in the future.

The polling questions will be available via the polls feature in Teams, and I will also be adding the questions to the chat for our audience members who are not able to use the Teams polls feature due to the organization setting. If the polls feature does not work for you, please feel free to respond to the polling questions in chat instead.

The questions are the same, so please either use the polls feature or the chat, whichever option works best for you. I will start the polls now while we finish the webinar introduction. All right, you should now be able to see the first set of polling questions. Today's webinar will consist of a presentation followed up by a question and answer session.

Today's speaker will be Abby Miller, a user services specialist here at the USGS EROS. A graduate of Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. Abby has a Bachelor of Science in Geography, along with a minors in geospatial technology and travel and tourism. Abby has worked for the USGS EROS User Services team for the past two and a half years.

Abby's presentation will provide an overview of the USGS Earth Explorer, as well as demonstrations of several features in the USGS Earth Explorer and information on recent updates to the application. Once Abby has finished her presentation, we will then transition over to an optional set, a final polling questions, and then we will move on to a Q&A portion of the webinar.

We have several user services staff members and Earth Explorer developers here at EROS on the line to help answer any questions you may have after Abby finishes her presentation. Again, please feel free to add your questions or feedback throughout the webinar using the webinar chat, and we'll try to answer all your questions within the time allotted. But if you're not able to address your questions during the Q&A portion, we will follow up with you offline.

If there is a future webinar topic you would like to see us cover. Please feel free to suggest that in the chat as well. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Abby Miller. Take it away, Abby. Thank you for that introduction. Alrighty. Well, thank you once again for that introduction. And I thank everyone listening in today.

Without further ado, let's go ahead and jump right in. So an outline of today's webinar. First we'll talk about how to access data at EROS. Then we'll discuss what is Earth Explorer. Then we'll begin our tutorial section. We'll talk about how to search, how to create a standing request, also known as an ingest subscription. We’ll then explore the new browser overlay controls and then go over how to get more information on our data sets, how to find frequently asked questions, and other tips and information that might be useful.

We'll wrap up the webinar portion of today with giving you some contact information in case you have any questions, comments, or concerns post-webinar. All righty. EROS. The United States Geological Survey, also known as the USGS Earth Resource Observation and Science, also known as the EROS Center, is one of the largest civilian archives of images of the Earth's land surface in existence.

This includes tens of millions of satellite images. The majority of this data is available to the general public at no charge at all, and we offer a variety of methods to visualize and download this data. Here's how to access data from EROS. First is Earth Explorer, the topic of today's webinar. We also refer to it as EE, and this is our most popular option to search, browse and download data from the USGS archives.

Next, we have our Global Visualization Viewer, also known as GloVis, which is a tool for visualizing and accessing remote sensing data. Next we have machine to machine, also called M2M, a scripting tool for repetitive queries and downloads of data. Do know that this is for more advanced users and requires a background in some coding. Finally, we have our bulk download web application, also known as the BDWA, which streamlines downloading of large amounts of scenes.

We do have another webinar and more information on this as well. What is Earth Explorer? Earth explorer provides online search, browse, display metadata, export data, download and processing support for Earth science data from the Eros archives. Earth explorer provides an enhanced user interface 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Let's jump into our first tutorial. This is how to complete a basic search.

So to use Earth Explorer, you need to have an ERS account. If you do not already have an ERS account, we'll go ahead and walk through how to create one. We'll press Create New account.

Now we'll have to create a unique username as well as password. You'll see that there are username requirements and password requirements. On the right hand side of the screen.

Once you create your username and password that meet that criteria, press I am not a robot for the reCAPTCHA and press continue. Next, we'll collect some demographic information for you. This is to better understand how our data and downloads are being used, and to also help enhance the user experience going forward. So please select the data that best meets your search criteria and use case.

Once you've filled that information out, continue to contact information. Here we're collecting contact information. This is the best contact you in relation to your ERS account in Earth Explorer use. This information is not shared outside of the USGS. So once you fill that information in, save your contact information. And here you have the chance to edit any of your contact or demographic information before you submit your registration. Press the edit button. If you need to make any changes. Otherwise, submit your registration.

Once your registration is submitted, please keep an eye out for an email. You'll have to confirm your account and then we can log in on Earth Explorer. Press the login located on the right hand side. Now enter your new username. And now your password.

Press sign in and you will see where it once said. Log in. It says log out and displays your username. Before we begin our search, we'll check our system notifications. And now we'll search. There's a lot of ways to enter search criteria on Earth Explorer. If you have a KML file or shapefile to upload you can do that.

But we'll use the Geocoder and enter Sioux Falls, South Dakota for the sake of this tutorial. Sioux Falls is where EROS is located. Here we'll select our coordinate point. Here you can add more coordinates or a use I like is to zoom in on my coordinate point. I'll zoom in until it's to my liking. Adjust it and press the use map feature. You'll see that the screen of the map turns red. And when I zoom out, I have coordinate points where the map was zoomed in them. Next we'll select our date range from when our data was acquired.

You can also toggle if you would like certain months to show up. Certain data sets allow you to select how much cloud cover you would like, and your results per option page can be selected here as well. If you would like that to always show up, press Save to profile. Let's move on to selecting Data sets.

As you can see, there are a ton of options for data sets. On Earth Explorer we'll give you more information on that later. But for our tutorial now we'll be using the USDA’s NAIP aerial imagery.

And we'll also be selecting Landsat Collection two level one data from Landsat 8 and 9. We'll now select our additional criteria. As you can see additional criteria is optional.

You can toggle between your data sets as additional criteria does vary between data sets. We'll hop over to our Landsat 8 and 9. And since I would like to enter my path and row that I now, I will go ahead and do that. Know that this is not necessary to complete your search.

Perfect. And now that I've done that, and I am happy with my additional criteria, we'll press results.

Here we have our search results. It is displaying the five of 165 searches that it pulled up for our Landsat data set.

And we can go ahead and switch between the two data sets we selected at the dropdown menu. We'll start looking through our aerial imagery. If you print it will show a footprint of the area in which the aerial image is covering.

We also have download options add to bulk download and we can also exclude this scene from results. Let's check out our download options.

We'll press download compressed.

And we'll see that our download is staging.

Here. You will see the download. This may vary depending on your browser settings and personal computer settings. Now we'll head back over to our Landsat data.

Here we have our Landsat data. Similar to NAIP, you can get a footprint of the scene.

This will show the area that it covers.

And you can also get a browse preview. This is showing the browse overlay. We can now look at this pencil and paper and have a preview of three browsers.

And also scroll down and see our metadata. Here we can add to the bulk download or exclude the scene from results where you will preview our download options. This data set has a lot more download options.

You can download these individual browsers for visualization and you can also download all files. Or we'll select some files. Here you can toggle what files you would like to download.

Menu. You can select band combinations to download if you would like. We'll download all selected now. We'll press okay.

And similar to our aerial imagery our downloads will vary.

We can clear search criteria in the top right side if you'd like to make another search. But that concludes our basic search tutorial.

So we'll move on to our tutorial on a standing request. You may ask, is a standing request for me? The standing Request function allows users to run searches for acquisitions in the background using the same search criteria. You must be logged into ERS to create. This is great for getting the most up to date data from various data sets without needing to code.

This is also known and referred to as an ingest subscription. Let's begin our tutorial.

See, we already have our coordinate point placed.

And we'll go ahead and set a date range. For this tutorial, we're actually going to set our date ending in the future as we want future imagery.

Depending on the data set, we can toggle or cloud cover. We'll move on to our data sets. Once again, we'll be downloading from USDA's NAIP aerial imagery.

In our Landsat collection 2 level 1 data from Landsat 8 and 9. We'll skip our additional criteria, go straight to results, and press Submit standing request. Here we are on our create subscription page and we will set our run frequency. Do know every time your subscription is ran you will receive an email.

Here you can name your subscription.

And you can set up your start running date in your run until date.

Once you have your date set, you can now toggle what result formats you would like to receive the data in.

You can also toggle additional features depending on the data set. Let's create our subscription.

Now you have a preview of the subscription that you've created. It'll give you more information on the options you selected.

Here you can return to your subscription list.

But we'll go back to Earth Explorer and show you how to access your subscriptions again. If you are logged in. Press the person with the cog, which will get you to your user settings. On your left hand side, you'll see quite a few options. We'll want to press the ingest subscription on the left hand side towards the bottom.

Here we will see a list of every standing request that has been created. You can view your details. And you can also enable and disable the downloads. When you disable it, it means you will no longer be receiving downloads or emails. We'll check our run history. Which will give you information about when it has run. And if it was successful.

We'll return to our subscription list.

And we'll go ahead and view our subscription details. Once again, this is just giving you an overview of how you set the subscription to run. We'll return to our subscription list.

And head back to Earth Explorer. And that concludes our standing request tutorial.

Now we'll be going into our new browser overlay controls. These are great for previewing and visualizing band combinations without having to bring them into a GIS software. Landsat level one scenes now offer several new overlay options. Overlays are for visualization use only. See the Landsat collection two full resolution Browse Images page for information on downloadable browse, which are accessible through the download options.


Tutorial.

So once again we have our coordinate placed and we have a date range placed. For this tutorial, we'll go ahead and set it up for the month of August. We'll select our data sets. This time we'll only be using Landsat collection 2 level 1 data, and we'll pull our results.

Here we will show the browse and footprint controls. You can show all footprint by selecting this button.

And you can show all browse from the current page by selecting this button. Next we will select our footprint. Here we can look at our default browse which you can change. And if the default browse option is not available, you can also set a backup alternative. Browse. You can toggle your browse overlay opacity.

And now if you press the compare, browse the microscope with the piece of paper on whichever scenes you would like to compare. You can go ahead and compare your browse. This will take you to our secondary page. In which you can add the three available browsers per scene to your map. And add our reflective color from our first scene, and a reflective color from our second scene, and we'll play around with it.

Here you can toggle the opacity of each scene.

You can hide and disable the overlay, or you can remove it. You can add multiple browsers from the same scene.

And rearrange the order in which they show up.

We'll remove those.

And we'll continue to play around with it.

You're able to download the scene if you like it from this menu as well. It'll look similar to the download scene from the first tutorial. We can also remove our browse for comparison and press the Earth Explorer button to go home. That concludes our new Browse Overlay Controls tutorial.

Finally, let's talk about how to get more information on our data sets, how to find frequently asked questions and other information, and how to leave us some feedback on our Earth Explorer app.

On our datasets page, you can open up and preview the data sets. If you want more information, press the I. It'll bring you to a new tab, giving you tons of information on the data set, along with some contact information relevant to the data set. If you're the area that the data set covers, press the picture of the map, which will give you a coverage map to show where the data set has coverage over.

We'll head back to the main page of Earth Explorer.

And here we have the Earth Explorer Help Index. Not only does it have helpful information on Earth Explorer, but also relevant tools like our ERS and bulk download. Here you can find help pages which provide more information and walkthrough along with other frequently asked questions. This is a great place to start before writing in or calling in to customer service.

Now, if you'd like to leave us some feedback, press the feedback button. This will take you to our Feedback Submission page, where it will already fill in your name and email. If you're logged in, you can select the application name and leave us some feedback. Select the reCAPTCHA and submit your feedback. This will be emailed directly to our Customer Help email.

You can press Return to Application to continue your Earth Explorer search.

Perfect. And that concludes our last tutorial. Now we'll go over some Earth Explorer news. Keep an eye out for the new NLCD 2023 data set. Expect this to arrive in the winter of 2024. It's also to note that NASA's LP DAAC data sets were removed from Earth Explorer on August 30th. It's also good to know that we do have a planned monthly maintenance.

This is typically scheduled one Wednesday a month from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. central time, and we do post before letting you know. As we wrap it up, we have our contact information. You can email us at custserv@usgs.gov. We try to get back to you within three business days. You can also give us a call at either of these numbers

within our working hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. central or leave us a message after hours. Not only is the feedback button available on Earth Explorer, but many of our other tools as well. Now, if you would like to stay up to date with EROS User Group, join our EUG listserv. All you have to do is write an email to our custserv@usgs.gov requesting to join.

Thank you so much for listening in on my presentation on Exploring Earth Explorer. We are now transitioning into our question and answer segment. Thank you for a great presentation, Abby. For those listening in, I have added some final links to the chat with more information about the USGS Earth Explorer, as well as details about how to sign up to be notified for future webinars, and a link to watch some of our previously recorded webinars.

At this time, we'll move on to our polling questions, so I will go ahead and add those to the chat. And then I will also launch the next poll. And you should now see the polling questions on your screen or in the chat. Please take a few minutes to respond to those questions. Reminder these are the same set of questions, so please answer via the polls feature and Teams.

if your organization allows that, or feel free to answer via chat. Whichever method works best for you. If you have any final questions or feedback about the USGS Earth Explorer, or perhaps any features you'd like to see added to the tool in the future, please feel free to add that to the chat as now as well. With that, we'll give you a few moments to answer the polling questions and submit any final questions or feedback that you may have.

It looks like we do have some of the polling questions rolling in, so thank you to all of those who are answering those questions. With that, we'll go ahead and start to field some questions from the audience. The first question we have is from Shannon. Can we download data from GloVis or only from EE? Yes, you can download from both GloVis and EE. EE, Earth Explorer, is going to have all of our data sets, whereas GloVis is only going to offer a few of the data sets like a, DLQ and EL1, and any of the Landsat.

But there they're basically the same as far as grabbing from the silo of the data. It's just two different interfaces. You will need to log in to both with a username and password to download. Perfect. Thank you, Deb. I have another question - can you create or compare Landsat band ratios such as NDVI in EE? I can also take this one.

I know Abby did show the browse overlay options, and one of those does have an NDVI ratio. You can create your own, but we've added several of the more popular options. Joe, you might be able to correct me, but I think we have about 7 to 10 browse options there. I know NDVI is one of those.

And reminder that data is not data that you can download, but you are able to browse preview it as visualization purposes. And the next question I received is could we please get the recorded video at the end of the tutorial? Yes, that will definitely be available at a later date, but it will be available on that training page.

And we posted a link to the training page in chat, and we'll also advertise it once it's available. Let's see our next question is....thank you. Can we change the color band of Landsat or other data? I'm not sure exactly what you mean there. Do you want to provide more explanation in the chat? We'll try to be able to answer it.

And our next question is, is there any solution for slow internet areas? Because where I'm from, the internet's very slow and I'm already trying to download the file and it takes me several hours. I don't know, Joe, if you have any advice there, I think we are kind of limited to what your bandwidth is. I think, yes, we are limited.

We do have a couple of options. One of them is to add the scenes that you want to what we call a bulk order. And I believe Abby said that's covered in a different webinar. But when you add items to a bulk order from Earth Explorer and submit that it goes into a separate queue, and then you open up a separate application called the bulk Download Web application, which we call BDWA.

From there, you can select your order and start the download, and it will run things in the background. And if it fails, it will automatically retry. So at that point at least you don't have to babysit it. You can let it run in the background through the way. Perfect. Thank you Jill. Our next question is please, is it possible to download satellite imagery of higher resolution showing imagery footprint?

Similar to what's obtainable in Google Earth Pro? Deb, would you like to take that one and talk a little bit about the aerial data? Yes I would. Something to keep in mind with aerial imagery is that it covers just the United States, only for users that want to do outside of the United States. I would suggest maybe looking at the declassified data, you will find that there's three different data sets out there.

There's D-class one, D-class two, D-class three. However, this large format camera was put on the space shuttle. So it's going to only be those years that that was active. So you won't find aerial imagery current outside of the United States. The resolution again is going to determine which dataset you're looking at. I will tell users that pre-2000, it's based on scale versus resolution.

And scale is because of the film, how it was taken and how we processed the imagery. 2000 up, we have three data sets that refer to the resolution. It would be the Doc Hughes HRO high resolution ortho imagery. Those two data sets ended at about 2010. We currently have NAIP, National Agriculture Imagery Program, that is flown by the USDA out of Salt Lake City, and that imagery is anywhere from one meter to 0.3 (m).

Again, most of that data, I would say 90% of that data is available for download at no charge. Perfect. Thank you. And then we have a couple more questions coming in our standing request used to request data sets from several years ago. For example, when I need to input a standing request to access data from 2019. I take that question to a standing request.

Just for any data that we will be loading into Earth Explorer. Can you put it in as far as 2018? Yes. You could. The data set that you may get would be, fall, more into the aerial imagery. Or if we reprocess any of the data to enter it into a new data set. A lot of times a 2018, we're getting pretty caught up, that it should hit that much would be for like the aerial photo, single frames, those data sets that we are entering in or the NAPP or NHAP, NAPP, NHAP, that data that we're making available as a high resolution scan product at 25 microns, or a thousand dots per inch, otherwise, a lot of people will just use it for incoming data from today to forward.

But yes, you can set it back there. You may or may not get any hit determining which data set, and if you have questions with that, send it into customer service and we'll help you get that set up. Perfect. Thank you. Deb, the next question we have is is there a way to download large scale data more efficiently, rather than downloading individual scenes one by one?

Would this be a good time to shout out our bulk download web application? Absolutely. Go ahead. Abby. Perfect. So we have actually not only a shorter form YouTube video, but we have a previous webinar talking about our bulk download web application, which works with Earth Explorer, and you would be adding whichever scenes or other imagery you would like to your bulk order, and it'll download it in one nice package.

And like I said, if you go either on our help page from Earth Explorer or I believe the USGS’s YouTube page, you can find not only the short form video, but our longer webinar on the topic. And I'm going to also throw in there that we do have a machine to machine API, and this is for more of the advanced users.

That is when your server is talking to our server. It's done all through a script. And again send in an email and we can help you determine which bulk access would be best for you guys. Perfect. Thank you. And we did get clarification on one of the questions from earlier. The user wants to use Landsat data set for remote sensing.

And they want to change the color band. For example they want to change the red color as blue. Can they do that in EE or should they download the data set. That is not something they would be able to do in Earth Explorer. We have specific formulas set up in Earth Explorer as Abby demonstrated. We have several new band combinations that you can use for display on the screen, but inside the tool, inside the website, we only have those predefined formulas.

Perfect. Thank you. Let's see what another question. Can you explain the difference between level one and level two? I mean, the biggest difference is that level two has atmospheric corrections while level one does not. I do Linda Owen is on. If you would like to unmute and perhaps give a little more detail. I'd be happy to. Level one products, like you said Danielle, have no atmospheric correction. Level two include our surface reflectance and surface temperature products, which are atmospherically corrected. Perfect. Thank you Linda. And it looks like that's all the questions that we have so far. Just reviewing real quick to make sure I didn't miss any. And I do see someone post a link to our data levels in the chat.

So thank you very much for that. Let's see if there's any more questions that are rolling in. Again, feel free to post any questions or feedback you have. If there's any features you'd like to see in Earth Explorer. That's looking like that might be all of the questions that we have for today. So don't forget if you do have additional questions later on the USGS, Earth Explorer or any data, tools or services from the USGS EROS that we provide, you can always email our team at custserv@usgs.gov.

I threw that email in the chat. You can also see it on the screen. But again thank you for joining us today. We hope to see you at our next webinar in the future that will be on accessing and working with Landsat data in the cloud. So if you'd like to be notified of one, that webinar will occur.

Please sign up for that Eros User Group by emailing custserv@usgs.gov and mention that you'd like to be signed up for the EROS User Group. Again, thank you all for taking time to join us today. We hope you have a wonderful rest of the day and we'll stick around in case anyone had a couple more questions.

We'll stick around for a couple more minutes. But thanks again, everyone for joining us. And it looks like we do have a hand up. David, I don't have a way to unmute you, but if you want to post your question in chat, I'd be happy to read it out loud. For those still on the call, we're just sticking around in case there's any last minute questions that come up in the chat, so feel free to drop.

Or if you'd like to wait out those questions, maybe some have a question you're interested in. And we had a question in the chat. Will there be a similar workshop on GloVis? Thank you for the recommendation. We'll look into that, but I don't see why we couldn't provide one. So I'll add it to our list as a suggestion from a user.

Thanks, Ron. And if you did like this presentation, Abby gave a great presentation on the BDWA that we mentioned earlier that bulk download web application and that recording is available on the USGS training YouTube space. I'll post that one more time and chat for anyone that joined a little late. But yes, while everyone sticking around, if there's any other webinars that you would like to see it, please feel free to suggest them in the chat and we'd be happy to look into giving one in the future.

We'll stick around for about five more minutes in case anyone had any last minute questions they were trying to answer in the chat, or to give you extra time to answer those polling questions. But thank you again for joining us. If anyone joined us late, this will be recorded and available on that YouTube channel at a later date.

Looks like we have another question in the chat. I appreciate what you do. How can I join your team? Any time we do have positions open, they'll be posted under careers.kbr.com for our contractor positions. EROS has a wide variety of employees about, I'd say roughly 600 people who work at EROS. A lot of those are contractors.

So I'll post a link to that in the chat. And then also we do a lot of federal employees as well. So I'll post a link to the chat to learn more about those positions as well. And as a reminder, in case anyone's interested in joining that EROS user group, I'll post that link in the chat one more time as well, just in case anyone's interested in joining that group.

All right. It looks like our questions are starting to wind down as are our polling responses. So thank you again everyone that joined us. Again. If you joined late this was recorded and it'll be available at a later date on that USGS Trainings YouTube channel as well as in the help section of Earth Explorer. With that, we're going to go ahead and conclude this webinar.

So thank you all again for joining us and we hope you have a nice day. Thanks.