NASA WELD Land Cover Change Product for Contiguous US

NASA Web-Enabled Landsat Data 5-year Land Cover Land Use Change Product is a 30-meter resolution composite for the contiguous United States. It was generated from five consecutive growing seasons of weekly Landsat ETM+ data between April 2006 and November 2010. This NASA-USGS-SDSU collaboration project has been decommissioned and is distributed in HDF4 format.

Use Cases

• Analyzing tree cover loss patterns across the contiguous US from 2006 to 2010.
• Mapping bare ground gain to study urban expansion or agricultural change.
• Establishing a baseline land cover state for ecological or hydrological modeling.
• Studying seasonal and interannual land surface changes using weekly composite inputs.

Strengths

• Provides a consistent 5-year time series from April 2006 to November 2010 for change detection.
• Offers 30-meter spatial resolution derived from Landsat ETM+ terrain-corrected data.
• Is a product of a formal collaboration between NASA, USGS EROS, and South Dakota State University.

Limitations

• Dataset was decommissioned in December 2019 and is no longer updated.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date (2010-11-17 vs. 2026 03-12), suggesting metadata inconsistency.
• Specific column names, row counts, and file sizes are not provided in the available metadata.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States Geological Survey (USGS) EROS Center, South Dakota State University (SDSU) GSCE.

Collection Method

Generated from five years of consecutive growing season weekly composite inputs using Landsat Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) Terrain Corrected data.

Time Range

2006-04-15 to 2010-11-17

Freshness

2010-11-17 23:59:59.999000

Geography

Contiguous United States (CONUS)