RADARSAT-2 Imagery now available

RADARSAT-2, Canada's new commercial SAR satellite, was launched in December 2007 on a Soyuz vehicle from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Operating in C-band, the RADARSAT-2 ensures continuity of all existing RADARSAT-1 modes.

RADARSAT-2 technical enhancements provide improved capabilities for mapping. These enhancements include high-resolution 3-meter data and multi-polarization, which improve the discrimination and recognition of surface features and targets. In addition, greater positional information and control over the RADARSAT-2 orbit garners higher absolute accuracies of end products (eg. InSAR and DEMs).

For environmental concerns, RADARSAT-2 will provide marine surveillance, from tracking commercial fishing activities to monitoring oil spill occurrences as well as improved land cover mapping, particularly in grasslands and forests.

Landsat Image Archive to Be Freely Available

Great news for environmental projects such as analyzing historical land use patterns, monitoring human impacts, and obtaining recent snapshots of environmental baseline data from satellite imagery - Landsat images are the "workhorse" data source for many environmental applications.

From a press release from the USGS:

As part of the transition to National Land Imaging Program sponsored by the Secretary of the Interior, the USGS has posted a schedule to provide users with electronic access to any Landsat scene held in the USGS-managed national archive of global scenes dating back to Landsat 1, launched in 1972.

By February 2009, any archive scene selected by a user – with no restriction on cloud cover – will be processed automatically to a standard product recipe, using such parameters as the Universe Transverse Mercator projection, and staged for electronic retrieval. In addition, newly acquired scenes meeting a cloud cover threshold of 20% or below will be processed to the standard recipe and placed on line for at least three months, after which they will remain available for selection from the archive.

Newly acquired, minimally cloudy Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) data covering North America and Africa are already being distributed by the USGS over the Internet at no charge, with expansion to full global coverage of incoming Landsat 7 data to be completed by July 2008 (see timeline above). The full archive of historical Landsat 7 ETM+ data acquired by the USGS since launch in 1999 will become available for selection and downloading by the end of September 2008.

By the end of December of 2008, both incoming Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) data and all Landsat 5 TM data acquired by the USGS since launch (1984) will become available, with all Landsat 4 TM (1982-1985) and Landsat 1-5 Multi-Spectral Scanner (MSS) (1972-1994) data becoming available by the end of January 2009.

This plan will only allow 1 recipe of data to be produced. Landsat 7 data will not have any gap correction applied. The 20% or less cloud cover images will be processed automatically, the higher cloud cover scenes will be processed as ordered with no plans for prioritization of orders.

• Pixel size: 15m/30m
• Media type: Download (web-enabled)
• Product type: L1T (terrain-corrected)
• Output format: GeoTIFF
• Map projection: UTM
• Orientation: North up
• Resampling: Cubic convolution
• DEM: GLS DEM (SRTM, NED, CDAD, DTED, GTOPO 30)
  

RADARSAT-2 Successfully Launched

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. announced the successful launch of RADARSAT-2, Canada’s commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite. The satellite was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan December 17 at ~ 05:17 Pacific Standard Time on a Soyuz launch vehicle. Check out the launch video.

In addition to providing data continuity for RADARSAT-1, RADARSAT-2 is also supposed to improve data repeatability, and data quality for applications such as environmental monitoring, ice mapping, resource mapping, disaster management and marine surveillance.

SkyTruth has used RADARSAT data in documenting oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina as well as the Cosco Busan oil spil in the San Francisco Bay. It's also an indispensible tool for detecting and monitoring the locations of vessels at sea: we're currently assessing the feasibility of using satellite images to monitor vessel activity in the Papahānaumokuākea (Northwest Hawaiian Islands) Marine National Monument, with support from the Campbell Foundation. We look forward to many more years of using RADARSAT to monitor our coastal waterways!