The past week I worked on a full re-write of lsru (Landsat Surface Reflectance Utils), a python package to order, query and download Landsat surface reflectance data.

Unprocessed Landsat data (Top of atmosphere radiance) can be downloaded directly without the need to place an order; manually or using packages like Landsat-util. Surface reflectance refers to data that have been corrected for atmospheric effects; one way to obtain surface reflectance Landsat data is via the ESPA on demand pre-processing platform. It is what lsru helps you do, programmatically, from python.

The initial version I had written for a rather specific research project of my friend Simon was mostly command line oriented, without a really usable API, and broke a long time ago when the USGS changed its naming conventions for Landsat with the release of collection 1. I therefore decided to give it a complete overhaul.

The new version of lsru has a fully functional and documented API, online documentation, support both python 2 and 3, and can be installed directly from pypi (pip install lsru).

Its features are:

• Query the USGS catalog (spatio-temporal window with various optional filters) using the Usgs class
• Place pre-processing orders to the ESPA platform for a list of scenes using the Espa class
• Handling ESPA orders status monitoring and download with the Order class
• A few helpers to help e.g. placing orders using a polygon, downloading data, etc

If you use it and discover a bug or think of additional features don’t hesitate to let me know by raising an issue on github or by sending me an e-mail.