Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data products are distributed by NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LPDAAC) to a broad user community. The HLSL30 and HLSS30 products are provided in Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format where individual bands (11 bands for HLSL30 and 13 bands for HLSS30) are provided as band-separated files in addition to four angle bands and a quality assessment (QA) band. Based on the latest metrics (2023 Q4) HLS archive is around 4 TB with nearly 26 million files produced. Between August 2020 and September 2023 LPDAAC has distributed close to 6.2 TB of HLS data corresponding to more than 665 million files to end users. This translates to a 26-fold distribution to production ratio for files but only 1.5-fold for the data volume. This is a notable metric which highlights the importance and usefulness of the COG standard which is being adopted by NASA. COG formats allow end users to selectively access data from certain bands of choice or data confining to a region of interest without requiring unnecessarily large amounts of data download.
