Using TiTiler-CMR in Worldview and FIRMS
NASA’s Worldview application is a general purpose visualization tool, allowing users to interactively browse, compare, and animate more than a thousand NASA satellite products. Since 2021, Worldview has provided easy access to daily, global 30-meter resolution true-color imagery from the HLS project, via the Global Imagery Browse Services. GIBS is an open imagery archive of pre-generated imagery that is optimized to rapidly serve more than a thousand visualized data products from high-value missions.
The integration of the TiTiler-CMR API into Worldview further enables multispectral visualization, allowing users to dynamically generate custom composites. Users can assign specific spectral bands to red, green, and blue channels, or they can select from pre-generated combinations and indices to highlight relevant features of the land, water, or atmosphere. This capability allows users to better distinguish between surface features and to identify unique information not visible in standard true-color imagery.
For example, the color infrared (near-infrared) composite is often ideal for analyzing vegetation health, as chlorophyll reflects near-infrared light. The combination of near-infrared and visible light makes healthy vegetation appear vibrant red, water as dark blue/black, and urban areas as white or gray. Furthermore, custom indices can then be applied to monitor vegetation stress by utilizing the red band (absorption) and near-infrared band (reflection).
Future developments in Worldview will enable users to dynamically generate true-color composites for the Arctic polar stereographic projection, providing access to high-resolution imagery previously unavailable for this region. For a comprehensive walkthrough of how to visualize HLS data in Worldview, view this NASA Earthdata tutorial.