How to Get View Azimuth Angle (VAA) for Landsat 8 Level-2

The collection-2/level-2 data of Landsat-8 typically includes atmospherically corrected surface reflectance and surface temperature images but doesn’t have the data of the view azimuth angle (VAA) at that level. This article will introduce two methods to get the data of VAA.

Checking Landsat-c2-l1 to Find VAA

For an image in Landsat-c2-l2, you can check its Solar Azimuth Angle (SAA), Solar Zenith Angle (SZA), View Azimuth Angle (VAA) and View Zenith Angle (VZA) in Landsat-c2-l1 to find those angles.

For example, for an image from Landsat-c2-l2 with the ID LC08_L2SP_164040_20230624_02_T1, you can use the path (164), row (040), and date (20230624) to search the corresponding Landsat level-1 image in Earth Explorer. The “Landsat_scene_id” of both images are the same.

Search for the Image in the Earth Explorer

After downloading the image package, you can find the “*_VAA.TIF” file. The following image shows an example of reading the “VAA.TIF” file in the QGIS. Note that the pixel values are in units of hundreds of degrees. Therefore, the angle values in the image are from -155 to 135 degrees.

Downloaded VAA.TIF View in QGIS

Calculating Azimuth Angles from the ANG.txt Landsat8 File

Another method is calculating the angles from the “ANG.txt” angle metadata file included in Landsat level-2 data. USGS provides a purpose-built C program, which can be seen in the “Tools and Documentation” section at the bottom of this page.

Download Link of L8_ANGLES_2_7_0.tgz

By following the “README” of the program provided by USGS to calculate the angles using the program, you can, for example, get the VAA and VZA for each band.

Creating VAA and VZA for Band 4 with Sample Factor 1

With these two methods, we can get the value of VAA.