GISCafe: GISCafe Voice

GISCafe Voice

Posts Tagged ‘Landsat’

The importance of U.S. commercial satellite imagery

Friday, April 13th, 2012

High resolution imagery of sub-meter – less than 40 inches – is only available from GeoEye, DigitalGlobe, Astrium Geo, and ImageSat. It is what the stuff of Google is made of. GeoEye and DigitalGlobe represent approximately 75% of this market, and 2/3 of their revenue is tied to the U.S. government. There are lots of free, government sources of satellite imagery like Landsat, and weather satellites from NASA and NOAA, but these are not high-resolution satellites that can zoom in on your house, or support 3D modeling for engineering and virtual reality-type applications.

Read about why U.S. commercial satellite imagery is important:

The Fate of U.S. Commercial Satellite Imagery – and why you should care LBx Journal

Tags: DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, geospatial, GIS, Google, high-resolution satellites, Landsat, NASA, NOAA, remote sensing, satellite imagery, sub-meter, U.S. government
No Comments »

“Change matters” viewer from Esri displays Vegas sprawl

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

The Change Matters viewer from Esri can show how your area has changed over a given time period, say for instance, from 1988 to 1990. Las Vegas is known for its phenomenal sprawl over the past four decades. Time-lapseimages from the Landsat earth monitoring satellites reveal in false-color, multispectral imagery how urban sprawl has stretched out from Nevada’s “Sin City” over the past four decades.

This latest video was posted by NASA in honor of the 28th anniversary of Landsat 5’s launch on March 1, but the pictures actually go back to 1972, when the Landsat program began.

Tags: Change Matters, earth monitoring satellites, ESRI, false-color, geospatial, GIS, Landsat, Landsat 5, multispectral imagery, NASA, Nevada, satellite imagery, Sin City, time lapse images
No Comments »