Read all 11 Landsat bands, and compute NDVI and NBR, in the browser.

The problem

Reading Landsat usually means getting it onto a desktop first

Find the scene in EarthExplorer, request the bundle, wait for the email, unpack a directory of per-band GeoTIFFs, then build the band math in a desktop GIS — all before you can see whether the scene was even worth downloading. For a question as ordinary as “how far did that burn scar go” or “is this field greener than it was in June,” that is a great deal of work to do ahead of the first look.

Watch it work

The six-minute walkthrough

Band switching across all 11 Landsat bands, NDVI and NBR on demand, and client-side pixel filtering used to isolate a burn scar.

What it does

Every band, two indices, and a pixel filter you can drag

• All 11 Landsat 8 and 9 bands, switchable — coastal aerosol through thermal infrared, plus the standard natural-color and false-color combinations.
• NDVI and NBR computed on demand, so vegetation vigor and burn severity are a click rather than a raster-calculator expression.
• Server-side raster function templates for the heavy renders, and client-side pixel filtering for the interactive ones — threshold a band and watch the result move as you drag.
• Scene selection by date and cloud cover, so you can step through a time series and see a change happen.
• Runs in a browser tab. No desktop GIS, no scene download, no account.

What it does not do

It is a viewer and a calculator, not a processing pipeline. It does not export analysis-ready rasters, apply atmospheric correction beyond what the published Landsat product already carries, mosaic scenes, or run supervised classification. It does not archive imagery either — pixels stream from a hosted imagery service, and nothing is stored for you between visits.

It also cannot manufacture a clear day. Landsat 8 and 9 together revisit roughly every eight days, so if cloud sat over your area on both passes, the honest answer is that there is no usable scene for that window. And the indices here are the standard normalized-difference formulations — genuinely useful for comparison and triage, but not a calibrated severity product, and they should not be reported as one.

Where the data comes from

Landsat 8 and 9, a joint USGS and NASA program

Every pixel comes from Landsat, operated jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA and distributed as public domain open data. The app reads Landsat 8 (OLI/TIRS) and Landsat 9 (OLI-2/TIRS-2) collections through a hosted multispectral imagery service; the scenes, their calibration and their quality assessment bands are USGS/NASA products, not All Things Spatial ones.

All Things Spatial is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Geological Survey or NASA. Confirm currency, accuracy and fitness for purpose with the mission programs before relying on any scene or index for operational, regulatory or financial decisions.