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Landsat Collection 2 temporal cloud truth mask validation set

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Metadata Last Checked: August 25, 2025 | Last Modified: 20250711
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, SD has developed a cloud validation dataset from Collection 2 images throughout the history of Landsat. Two North American locations with high overlap between WRS-1 and WRS-2 were chosen. For each location, 20 images were selected at random from the Landsat archive, with at least one scene taken from each Landsat satellite between the years of 1972-2024. This provides a sampling of the 50-year history of Landsat data over the two chosen locations -- New Brunswick and Tuscon, AZ. It is intended that more locations will be added to this dataset in the future. For each scene, a manual cloud validation mask was created. While these validation images were subjectively designed by a single analyst, they provide useful information for quantifying the accuracy of clouds flagged by various cloud masking algorithms. Each mask is provided in GeoTIFF format, and includes all bands from the original Landsat Level-1 Collection 2 data product (COG GeoTIFF), and its associated Level-1 metadata (MTL.txt file).

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