s July 26, 2016
In September 1964, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall successfully shepherded some of the most remote and rugged terrain within the continental United States into the jurisdiction of the National Park Service (NPS) with the creation of Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.
In this 100th anniversary year of the NPS, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 has acquired a stunning, false-color image that enhances the park’s irregular topography. No paved roads exist to join together the park’s three main districts—Island in the Sky, the Needles, and the Maze. The Horseshoe Canyon Unit is the detached part of the park in the upper left corner of the image.
In the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, countless canyons, mesas, and buttes have emerged over millennia from the eroding forces of water and gravity across the park’s 1,365 square kilometers (527.5 square miles). Perhaps the most accessible district is Island in the Sky, a relatively flat mesa that rises 600 meters above the Green River to the west and the Colorado River to the east.
The Needles District in the southeast corner of Canyonlands takes its name from the colorful spires of Cedar Mesa Sandstone that dominate the area. The least accessible district, the Maze, is a remote labyrinth of deep canyons set against a landscape of standing rocks above it.
But Canyonlands’ colorful beauty doesn’t end there. Landsat imagery captures the deeply cut meanders and oxbows carved out by ancestral rivers in the national park. It also reveals the distinct, circular Upheaval Dome on the northern border of Canyonlands, a formation that geologists say was either created by a meteorite impact or by the movement of salt layers deep underground.
Fire and Rebirth: Landsat Tells Yellowstone’s Story July 19, 2016
In the summer of 1988, a wildfire ravaged the world’s first national park, consuming 1.2 million acres in and around the Greater Yellowstone Park ecosystem. Landsat imagery became an important record of the burn severity and recovery.
As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, which was established to better manage Yellowstone and other national parks within the Department of Interior, Landsat continues to prove the outstanding value of its land-monitoring mission. The June 2016 image, captured by Landsat 8, portrays the widespread recovery of tree cover and other vegetation within the 28-year-old burn scar.
The national park’s western border is easily evident in images acquired shortly before and after the fire, on Sept. 22, 1987, and again on Oct. 10, 1988. A prohibition on logging in the national park is revealed in a dividing line of land use that shows dark green forests to the right of the park boundary, and the pink and light green hues of forest clearcuts to the left.
Yellowstone’s healing since the fire is obvious in the time-series views as well. Landsat 5’s shortwave infrared, near-infrared, and red bands combine in the October 1988 image to reveal vibrant red burn scars above and below Yellowstone Lake. In 2016, the scars have faded beneath the lush, green forest canopies and resurgent grasslands.
Landsat, ASTER Work Together on Russian Wildfires July 14, 2016
Remotely sensed imagery of wildfires burning in the Siberia region of Russia shows the complementary possibilities of Landsat 8 and NASA’s ASTER sensor aboard its Terra satellite.
Lightning triggered dozens of forest fires in remote Siberia in late June 2016, burning as much as 7,400 acres, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. Imagery acquired from Terra ASTER on June 29 shows smoke billowing from a small and a large fire, as well as some older burn scars. A day later, when Landsat 8 passed overhead, there was almost no smoke coming from the smaller fire, and a more pronounced scar. Vegetation appears red in the false-color imagery because near infrared (NIR) spectral bands used by both sensors are sensitive to vegetation greenness and were placed in the red position of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) composite images. Burn scars appear a dark brown to black wi