A first look at the OPERA Surface Water eXtent and Land Surface Disturbance products and their applications
- 1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA
- 2Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, USA
- 3Department of Mathematics, University of California Los Angeles, USA
- 4Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, USA
- 5United States Geological Survey, USA
- 6NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, USA
Satellite remote sensing data provide key information needed to understand the dynamic behavior of our planet as well as to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. The Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in partnership with the US Geological Survey and the University of Maryland, starts releasing near-global products that are based on Harmonized Landsat-8 Sentinel-2 A/B (HLS) optical datasets in February 2023: (1) Dynamic Surface Water eXtent (DSWx-HLS) and (2) Land Surface Disturbance (DIST-HLS) product suites. These derived products have applications including monitoring and guiding future hazard management and recovery efforts. While OPERA does not have an urgent response requirement for disasters, the project will process and deliver the data to end-users as soon as possible. HLS has 2-3 day revisit frequency at the equator allowing the potential for OPERA products to help provide analysis ready data from before, during, and after some events to aid disaster response and recovery efforts. All the DSWx and DIST products will be freely available to the public through various Distributed Active Archive Centers (PO.DAAC for DSWx, https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/; LPDAAC for DIST, https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/) and NASA’s Earthdata Search platform based on their scheduled operational release.
Here, we present applications of the first provisional products from the DSWx-HLS and DIST-HLS suites to monitor changes in water bodies and vegetation cover due to droughts, floods, and wildfires. In particular, we focus our analysis on: (a) drastic extent changes in reservoirs, such as for Lake Mead from 2014-present, (b) mapping flood extents such as the 2020 dam failures in Midland, Michigan, and (c) mapping burned areas due to wildfires such as the 2022 wildfires in New Mexico and in California. We develop open-source tutorials using GIS software and Jupyter Notebooks to visualize and showcase these applications. Both the provisional data and the tutorials are available on the OPERA website (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/go/opera) to ensure broad access and reproducibility.
How to cite: Bato, M. G., Devlin, K., Dhillon, R., Bonnema, M., Sangha, S., Niemoeller, S., Pickens, A., Shiroma, G. H. X., Handwerger, A. L., Jones, J. W., Hansen, M., Osmanoglu, B., Venkataramani, K., Fattahi, H., Bekaert, D., Song, Z., and Chan, S.: A first look at the OPERA Surface Water eXtent and Land Surface Disturbance products and their applications, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 23–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-10200, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-10200, 2023.
