New courses and data from Satellite Image Data Service
Satellite data is being used all around us and over the
past year the geospatial industry has seen the birth of Google Maps and Google Earth. Recently, satellite
imagery has been used by the media to illustrate the
devastation of hurricane Katrina, which violently hit the Mississippi
delta region. It was also an essential source of information during the
emergency response of the 2005 Boxing Day Tsunami. Staff, researchers
and students in UK Higher and Further education now have the
advantage of being able to use the enhanced facilities
offered by the Satellite Image Data Service, funded by Jisc
and hosted at MIMAS.
The Service will be expanding over the next six months
to include a set of Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) images for the British Isles in an
orthorectified geotiff
format. ASAR images are gathered by the ENVISAT satellite, using
the ASAR technology. The advantage of ASAR is that it can create
accurate images, such as of the surface of the sea (see image below),
regardless of the weather or time of day. The new ASAR imagery will
be projected to GB National Grid and Irish Grid Coordinates and will be
available to academic users for education and research.
29 August 2005. This close up detail from the ASAR Wide Swath Mode image
of the area of the sea surface associated with Hurricane
Katrina's eye shows a darker, smoother sea surface, due to the
lack of winds at the central extreme low pressure.
Credits: ESA, 2005 http://www.esa.int
The Satellite Image Data
Service has also recently announced that it
will be offering an exciting new ten
module course -Image Processing for Remote
Sensing. The modules will examine all aspects of satellite image
processing and mapping.
In addition the Service also provides easy,
web-based access to a wide range of satellite imagery, such as Landsat 4/5 and
7, SPOT Panchromatic, ERS 1&2
amplitude and coherence radar data, Kinematic GPS profiles and 25m Digital
Elevation Model for the whole of the British Isles . In the near future there will be sample LiDAR and Disaster
Monitoring Constellation (DMC) data available for research and
teaching.
See more details on the ten module image processing
course.