NASA awarded $3.29 million to a five-year project led by professor David Roy of South Dakaota State's Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence. The project is in collaboration with USGS. The two key parts of the project:

(1) Process "Landsat observations every 16 days for all the contiguous United States and Alaska for a seven-year period and process those data so that they’re available to the user community over the Internet in a seamless manner."

(2) "The project also sets out to fill in gaps in the data. Since 2003, Roy said, there has been a problem with the Landsat sensor so that it has been unable to record the data for about 22 percent of each image. In addition, an average of about 35 percent of the Landsat data is obscured by clouds." The team will fill gaps using MODIS data.

- SDSU News