dataset · Global
HLS Landsat Operational Land Imager Surface Reflectance and TOA Brightness Daily Global 30m v2.0
The Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) project provides consistent surface reflectance (SR) and top of atmosphere (TOA) brightness data from a virtual constellation of satellite sensors. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) is housed aboard the joint NASA/USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites, while the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) is mounted aboard Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2A, Sentinel-2B, and Sentinel-2C satellites. The combined measurement enables global observations of the land every
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Licence: [Creative Commons BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Evidence quality: 47.5
Listed in aws-odr public catalogue API on 2026-10-16; relevance/value screened (haiku).
Metadata checked: 2026-10-14T13:20:00.000Z
What's in it
- Data offered docs-verified
- surface reflectance (SR) · top of atmosphere (TOA) brightness · 30 m NBAR (BRDF-adjusted reflectance) from Landsat 8/9 OLI · 11 spectral bands, 1 QA band and 4 angle bands
- Coverage docs-verified
- Global · 2013-04-11 to ongoing
- Resolution docs-verified
- 30 m spatial; combined OLI+MSI observations of land every 2–3 days
- Update frequency docs-verified
- Ongoing since 2013-04-11; no release schedule stated in docs
- Formats docs-verified
- Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG)
- Access docs-verified
- CC BY 4.0 licence. AWS S3 bucket (us-west-2) listed as Controlled Access; retrieval requires AWS credentials from the LP DAAC credentials guide.
Useful for
- Use cases llm-inferred
- Pre-development surface water and land-cover baseline from 30 m reflectance time series over a site · Multi-year vegetation and bare-soil change analysis for BNG habitat baseline mapping · Surface water and wetland extent screening to support FRA baseline work, checked against Fmask caveats
- Audience llm-inferred
- GIS analysts · ecologists · hydrologists · flood consultants · planners
Limitations
- Constraints docs-verified
- Unrealistically high aerosol retrievals over bright targets; pixels with both quality bits 6 and 7 set should be discarded · Fmask omission errors in water and cloud-shadow detection for data before April 2022 · Reflectance below -0.2 is set to NO_DATA (-9999) near snow, cloud and bright man-made targets · Some COG files lack the 0.0001 scale factor and 0 offset, so explicit scaling is needed · Incomplete CRS metadata in early granules; recent GDAL or rasterio is needed · Some duplicate L30 granules exist, and granules from May–July 2023 were removed for poor geolocation · Controlled access needs AWS credentials
Evidence
Check upstream coverage, uncertainty and licence before use. Station observations are not forecasts or design levels.