OPERA Land Disturbance Alerts with 19-Layer Analysis

Provisional data from 2024 to 2025 maps vegetation disturbance alerts at 30-meter spatial resolution using combined Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. The NASA-funded OPERA product contains 19 distinct data layers, including disturbance status, confidence, and duration, distributed in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF format. This version has been decommissioned in favor of a validated successor.

Use Cases

• Detecting deforestation events using the vegetation disturbance status and date of initial vegetation disturbance layers.
• Assessing wildfire burn severity and recovery by analyzing the current vegetation anomaly value and historical vegetation cover indicator.
• Monitoring agricultural land use changes through the vegetation disturbance duration and number of detected vegetation loss anomalies.
• Modeling general land surface change trends with auxiliary generic disturbance information derived from reflectance variations.
• Validating other land cover datasets using the high-temporal-frequency HLS data and the vegetation disturbance confidence layer.

Strengths

• Provides 19 distinct data layers for detailed disturbance analysis, including confidence metrics and temporal attributes.
• Leverages combined Landsat and Sentinel-2 data for high temporal frequency, increasing sensitivity to both rapid and gradual changes.
• Offers a fine 30-meter spatial resolution for detecting localized vegetation loss events.

Limitations

• This Version 0 product is provisional and was decommissioned in April 2025; users are directed to a newer validated version.
• Sources conflict on license information, listing both CC-BY-4.0 and 'other-license-specified'.
• Precise spatial and temporal extents, row counts, and total dataset size are not provided in the available metadata.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Derived from analysis of Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) data collected by Landsat 8/9 OLI and Sentinel-2 A/B/C MSI instruments.

Time Range

2024 to 2025

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:42:52.525536

Geography

Global