How to download free Landsat imagery with USGS Earth Explorer? The USGS Earth Explorer is a similar tool to the USGS Global Visualization Viewer (GloVis) in that users search catalogs of satellite and aerial imagery. The USGS Earth Explorer is the new and improved version.
Landsat 8 Download
The landsatxplore Python package provides an interface to the EarthExplorer portal to search and download Landsat Collections scenes through a command-line interface or a Python API.
It supports three data sets: LANDSAT_TM_C1, LANDSAT_ETM_C1 and LANDSAT_8_C1.
Searching for Landsat 5 TM scenes that contains the location (12.53, -1.53) acquired during the year 1995.
Search for Landsat 7 ETM scenes in Brussels with less than 5% of clouds. Save the returned results in a .csv file.
Downloading three Landsat scenes from different datasets in the current directory.
To use the package, Earth Explorer credentials are required (registration).
The package can be installed using pip.
landsatxplore can be used both through its command-line interface and as a Python module.
Command-line interface
Credentials
Credentials for the Earth Explorer portal can be obtained here.
--username and --password can be provided as command-line options or as environment variables:
Searching
Downloading
API
EarthExplorer API
landsatxplore provides an interface to the Earth Explorer JSON API. Please refer to the official (documentation) for possible request codes and parameters.
Basic usage
Searching for scenes
Landsat 8 Download Earth Explorer Full
Output:
