OPERA DIST-ALERT: Land Surface Disturbance Alerts from Harmonized Satellite Data

OPERA Land Surface Disturbance Alert from Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) product Version 1 maps vegetation disturbance alerts derived from Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 satellite data. The product provides 19 layers of information at a 30-meter spatial resolution, including disturbance status, confidence, date, and vegetation cover metrics. It is designed to detect land changes of varying magnitude and duration by combining high-temporal-frequency observations from multiple satellite sensors.

Use Cases

• Monitoring deforestation or wildfire impacts based on the vegetation disturbance status and date layers.
• Assessing agricultural land health trends using the historical percent vegetation cover layer.
• Validating land change models with the disturbance confidence layer and count of observations with loss anomalies.
• Tracking ongoing land degradation by analyzing the days of ongoing anomalies layer.

Strengths

• Provides high temporal frequency data at medium spatial resolution (30 meters) by harmonizing Landsat and Sentinel-2 observations.
• Contains 19 distinct data layers offering detailed metrics on disturbance, confidence, and vegetation cover.
• Available in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, facilitating cloud-based analysis.

Limitations

• Metadata conflicts exist: one source lists a CC-BY-4.0 license while another lists 'other-license-specified', and update dates are inconsistent.
• Column names and exact dataset size (rows, file size) are not provided in any source, limiting precise technical assessment.
• Known issues and additional usage constraints are referenced but not detailed in the provided descriptions.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), via the OPERA project funded by NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG).

Collection Method

Derived from data collected by Landsat 8, Landsat 9, Sentinel-2A, Sentinel-2B, and Sentinel-2C satellite sensors.

Time Range

The product contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data from 2020-2025.

Freshness

Last updated date reported as 2026-04-09 on one platform, but other platforms show no update information.

Geography

Global, as implied by the use of global satellite observation systems.