Join us as part of the USGS EROS User Experience Webinar Series, where we talk to staff at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center to learn more about the data, tools, and services available from EROS.
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite has collected over 4.7 million observations since its launch in 2000. ASTER data helps advance research and applications for volcano monitoring, mineral and geologic mapping, topography, and land cover change. NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center processes ASTER observations into 11 standard products that are archived within the Earthdata Cloud environment.
Key improvements in ASTER Version 4 include:
- Improved terrain correction and geolocation
- Updated atmospheric correction algorithms and ancillary input data sources
- Level-2 products delivered as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG), enabling efficient access and analysis in cloud-based, high-performance computing environments
What You’ll Learn
This session will cover product enhancements, new formats, changes in data access, and innovative ways to process and analyze ASTER data. Live demonstrations on accessing the data in NASA Earthdata Seach, opening and working with the data in QGIS, and a walkthrough of the “Exploring ASTER L1T Radiance” Python tutorial will be provided.
We will close the webinar with a question-and-answer session for anything related to ASTER data, or the tools used to access, process, and download the data.
Our guest speaker will be Nathan Roberts, a Data Scientist and contractor for USGS EROS.
Webinar Details
- Date: Thursday, Apr 2, 2026
- Time: 12:00 pm CDT (UTC/GMT-5)
- Duration: 1 hour
Please register to attend the “ What’s New in Data Access, Products, Formats, and How to Unlock the ASTER Cloud Archive” webinar. After registering, please either click “Add to Calendar” on the confirmation page or check your email, and possibly your spam folder, for a follow up email from Teams to ensure the webinar is saved to your calendar.
For questions or to sign up to be notified of future webinars in this series, please contact the USGS EROS User Services team at custserv@usgs.gov.
This webinar will be recorded and will be available on the EROS User Experience Webinars webpage at a later date as well as on the LP DAAC Learn section of the Earthdata Website.