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.

Looking for Landsat Explorer classic?

If you searched for a Landsat explorer, here is what this one does

Many people arrive here looking for Esri’s Landsat Explorer. This is a different, independent app built by All Things Spatial on the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript. It covers the jobs people most often open a Landsat explorer for:

• Browse all 11 Landsat 8 and 9 bands, with the standard natural-color and false-color combinations.
• Compute NDVI and NBR with one click.
• Find a scene by place, date range and cloud cover, then step through a time series.
• Swipe-compare two dates side by side.
• Download the full Level-2 scene, or single bands, as GeoTIFFs. Free, with no sign-in.

Launch the ATS Landsat Explorer

All Things Spatial is not affiliated with or endorsed by Esri. Esri’s own Landsat Explorer is available on ArcGIS Living Atlas.

Learn the technology

Landsat, explained

How a fifty-year satellite record is built, what the eleven bands and 30-meter pixels reveal, and how the scenes are delivered. The walkthroughs below show the app step by step.

Watch with transcript →

Watch it work

The five-minute walkthrough

Find a Landsat pass over Lake Mead, read it with NDVI, map a burn area with NBR, compare two dates, and open the same indices in ArcGIS Pro.

Download a scene — three ways in five minutes

Find and lock a pass, then take it three ways: every Level-2 band as a GeoTIFF, just the area on your screen, or straight from USGS — and open the files in ArcGIS Pro.

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.
• Find a scene by place, date range and cloud cover, lock it, and step through a time series to watch change happen.
• Compare two dates side by side with a swipe, plus Showcase before/after pairs such as Lahaina, and shareable links.
• Download the full Level-2 scene — atmospherically corrected surface reflectance, 10 files (eight bands as GeoTIFFs, the pixel-quality mask and the MTL metadata), about 750 MB, in one click or band by band, straight from Microsoft Planetary Computer. Or take the current view as a Level-1 11-band GeoTIFF, or open the official USGS page.
• Runs in a browser tab. No desktop GIS needed.

What it does not do

It is a viewer and a calculator, not a processing pipeline. It does not 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. Downloads are the published USGS products as-is; the app does not reprocess them.

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. Scene downloads come from the USGS Landsat Collection 2 Level-2 archive hosted by Microsoft Planetary Computer; the map itself shows Level-1 imagery through Esri’s hosted Landsat service.

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.