The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides US-wide data on land cover and land cover change at a 30m resolution with a 16-class legend. This Azure dataset reflects the CONUS and Alaska portions of NLCD 2016, which includes land cover for years 2001, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2016.
Source: U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
Domain: continental US and Alaska, 2001-2016
Resolution: 30m
This dataset was curated and brought to Azure by CarbonPlan.
Data are stored in blobs in the West Europe Azure region, in the following blob folder:
https://cpdataeuwest.blob.core.windows.net/cpdata/raw/nlcd
Within that folder, data are organized according to:
[region]/30m/[year].tif
region is the spatial domain; currently conus or ak.
year is the four-digit year (e.g. 2014).
Images are stored in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF format. The one and only image channel contains land cover labels according to the NLCD legend:
We also provide an API to get read-only SAS (shared access signature) tokens to allow access via, e.g., BlobFuse, which allows you to mount blob containers as drives:
https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/sas/v1/token/cpdataeuwest/cpdata
API documentation is at https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/sas/v1/docs.
Mounting instructions for Linux are here.
Large-scale processing is best performed in the West Europe Azure data center, where the data are stored.
A complete Python example of accessing and plotting NLCD data is available in the accompanying sample notebook.
For questions about this dataset, contact aiforearthdatasets@microsoft.com.
US national land cover for 2001.
Microsoft provides this dataset on an "as is" basis. Microsoft makes no warranties (express or implied), guarantees, or conditions with respect to your use of the dataset. To the extent permitted under your local law, Microsoft disclaims all liability for any damages or losses - including direct, consequential, special, indirect, incidental, or punitive - resulting from your use of this dataset. This dataset is provided under the original terms that Microsoft received source data.