OPERA DSWx-HLS: Global Surface Water Extent from Landsat and Sentinel-2

Validated surface water extent observations at 30-meter resolution are derived from harmonized Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A/B/C satellite data. Each data product is a set of 10 GeoTIFF files, including water classification, confidence scores, land cover, and a digital elevation model. Observations for this version 1 product began in April 2023 and are distributed in 109.8 km x 109.8 km UTM tiles.

Use Cases

• Flood mapping and inundation monitoring based on the water classification layer.
• Tracking seasonal and interannual changes in surface water bodies using the time-series of validated observations.
• Improving hydrological models by integrating the provided digital elevation model (DEM) and land cover classification.
• Assessing data confidence for specific analyses using the associated confidence layer for each water classification.

Strengths

• Provides validated surface water observations, suggesting a higher level of quality assurance than unvalidated products.
• Offers a high spatial resolution of 30 meters per pixel, enabling detailed analysis of water bodies.
• Integrates data from multiple satellite sources (Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A/B/C) through the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) product, likely improving temporal coverage.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as total row count, dataset size, and specific column names are not provided on any platform.
• The license information conflicts between sources, with AWS listing CC-BY-4.0 and Data.gov listing 'other-license-specified'.
• The temporal coverage is limited, with observations only beginning in April 2023, providing a short historical record.

Provenance

Source

NASA's OPERA (Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis) project, utilizing Copernicus Sentinel data.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing via the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI), processed through the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) version 2.0 pipeline.

Time Range

2023-04 to 2025 (based on 'modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023-2025)' notation)

Freshness

2026-04-09 23:25:59.782036 (last updated on AWS and Data.gov)

Geography

Global, distributed in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection tiles.