True-color Nadir, BRDF-Adjusted reflectance image of an ash plume emanating from an eruption at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, Tonga, on December 24, 2021. This image was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) aboard the Landsat 8 satellite. The underwater volcano is creating new land and previous eruptions in 2014-2015 created enough new land to connect between the two nearby islands of Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai.
The imagery available in NASA's Worldview is part of the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) project that provides 30 meter resolution true-color surface reflectance imagery from the OLI instrument aboard the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite and the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2A and -2B satellites. The data from the two instruments aboard the three satellites are processed through a set of algorithms to make the imagery consistent and comparable across the instruments. This includes atmospheric correction, cloud and cloud-shadow masking, spatial co-registration and common gridding, illumination and view angle normalization, and spectral bandpass adjustment.
Visit Worldview to visualize near real-time imagery from NASA's EOSDIS, and check out more Worldview weekly images in our archive.