New Landsat Collection 2 image services

[EmilyWindahl]

In the spring of 2021, Esri will introduce new Landsat image services comprised of Landsat 8, Collection 2 Level-2 imagery released by the USGS in December 2020. These new services will not only include all the quality improvements of Collection 2, but also provide users with atmospherically corrected and analysis ready imagery with the additional upgrade from Level-1 to Level-2 products.

The original plan was to retire the existing services, but it turns out we will not be retiring the existing services, after all. We will continue to support and update all existing Landsat Level-1 image services in addition to publishing the new Level-2 service.

For more details, check out Introducing Landsat Collection 2.

[MattWilkie1]

It doesn't like there is to be any service availability overlap between Collection 1 retiring and Collection 2 being brought online. Is that right? We're only a few weeks away from C1 going away and I haven't found any C2 availability. How are we to prep for the change? What do we do with new projects being created now that seek to use these services? Is historical landsat 4&5 going to be in the C2 service or is just LS8? (At only every 5 years the GLS service is temporally coarser grained than what we're looking for.)

Thanks!

[RWaterman]

@MattWilkie1 , we will have the new Collection 2 service available very soon to provide as much overlap and transition time as we possibly can.

We will post details in the blog post Emily noted as soon as the new service is available:  Introducing Landsat Collection 2 and retiring Collection 1.

The new service is just Landsat 8 Collection 2 (as replacement for the existing Landsat 8 Collection 1).

[MattWilkie1]

Thank you for the clarification @RWaterman. So is my revised understanding correct: it is not possible to narrow to a specific pre-Landsat 8 year, say 1987, using existing ArcGIS Online services?

Background: we have staff who are using Google Earth Engine to extract specific historical years from Landsat going back to 1984 for analysis in ArcGIS Desktop. It's created an administrative storage and management problem in the filesystem as people cache their own idiosyncratic copies. I'm looking at options alleviate this overhead.