JISC

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.